Ashfield Healthcare Communications has won gold for its medical writing training programme allegro at the UK Employee Experience Awards 2019.
The allegro team attended the awards last week and took home the gold award in the ‘Employee Engagement – Learning & Development (programme)’ category.
The programme is a 12-month, fast-track training initiative for life sciences graduates, providing a foundation for a long-term career in medical writing. Comprising an 8-week training phase and two 5-month agency rotations, at the end of the programme, employees join one of Ashfield’s agency teams in the UK as a medical writer.
More than 300 companies, including HSBC, Jaguar Land Rover and McLaren Automotive had been shortlisted in the awards’ categories to celebrate the best work and share best practices.
“This is an incredible achievement and shines a spotlight on our bespoke accelerated learning programme for aspiring medical writers,”said Ashfield’s programme director, Neil Marmont.
“As well as the obvious benefits of allegro in meeting the needs of our business from a resource perspective, the influx of talented individuals into the organisation is encouraging internal networking and the growth of really supportive, dynamic teams, which is impacting positively on the quality of the work we are delivering to our clients.”
Ashfield’s team (Neil Marmont, Andrew Davidson, Sarah Jackson, Katie Buxton and Danny Hawker) delivered a 15-minute presentation, covering the objectives, design, planning, implementation and business impact of the allegro programme, which has been running since January 2018. The presentation was followed by a Q&A with the judges.
The judges were particularly impressed with the individual stories of allegro alumni (Katie and Danny) and with the collaborative learning environment that allegro has created. They were also impressed with the scale of the programme and opportunities it provides for current staff tobeinvolved in training, mentoring, line management and coaching.