Aston University Coaching platform
Background
In 2025, Aston University will be celebrating its 130th anniversary as an institution. Students from over 120 countries choose to study at Aston University and it employs approximately 2000 staff.
Why did you choose to work with PLD?
We already used PLD for our Mentoring Platform following a tender process and approached them to see if they would work with us to produce a Coaching Platform….they said yes!
Aims
Having manually managed the coach/coachee matching process for some time and knowing how long it can take for matches to be confirmed, Aston University wanted to find a more efficient and effective way, enhancing the experience for the coachee, coach and Organisational Development managing the process.
They also wanted to digitise data collection to help with the termly data submissions that demonstrate the impact that their coaches are having.
Our Solution
Once a profile has been completed, coachees are able to view potential coach profiles, select the coach they want to work with and request the support themselves, all within that transaction. Coaches have been asked to respond as quickly as possible to requests and if they aren’t able to support, to share the reason why when declining a request, enabling the coachee to select another coach.
Aston asked us to build two questionnaires into the process to assess the coachee experience and the impact the coaching has had:
- Baseline questionnaire designed to share a coachee’s expectations and feelings at the start of their coaching journey.
- Evaluation questionnaire designed to assess how their expectations have been met and how they feel having been coached.
Results
Data is starting to come through, enabling Aston to measure the number of requests and relationships, along with hours of coaching, which they can use to cost out and demonstrate the money being saved using qualified internal coaches.For coachees, they can start the process and be matched with a coach at any time, without the need to involve a third party, which gives them more autonomy in the process.
For those working in Organisation Development, they can draw down data for all coaches and analyse the impact their coaches are adding. This is far less work than they used to have, previously they sent out an email to coaches for specific data, chasing responses when they hadn’t been returned within the timeline requested, updating a spreadsheet with the data and then reporting the data.
Client Comment
From a personal perspective as a coach, I book all meetings through the platform and through the email sent, add them to my outlook calendar. This records the meetings being had and means I don’t have to work out what coaching has been done every 4 months when a data draw is required.
How have you found working with PLD?
PLD listened to what we wanted the platform to achieve. As with anything new, there was a lot of feedback given and PLD were great at actioning the feedback and enhancing the system.
Since the platform was sent live, PLD have been supportive where minor changes need to be made and arrange catch ups twice a year to see how else they could enhance the platform to enable us to achieve our goals.
How easy have changes been to make and how responsive do you find the PLD support?
Very easy. We contact one of the team and ask if we can add something in or change an existing element and most requests we have made have been supported. For example, we recently asked for a ‘Last supervision’ date to be added so we can monitor coach supervision. Coaches receive an email asking them to update their last supervision session on their profile and if they haven’t been supervised within the last 12 months, we contact them to arrange time with a coach supervisor.
