Marshall Skills Academy recently welcomed to new members to its team – Oliver Papworth, Learning & Development Business Partner, and Mike Hannaford, Learning Facilitator and Assessor.
About Oliver
Oliver has been involved in learning and development for the past six or seven years, most recently for Vp, a Harrogate-based company that provides products and services to a diverse range of end markets including infrastructure, construction, and housebuilding.
Before that, he spent a couple of years as Learning and Development Manager for upmarket chocolatier chain Hotel Chocolat – where staff had near unlimited access to its product range. “Unfortunately, I no longer receive 50% staff discounts!” he says.
Oliver was involved across Hotel Chocolat’s entire supply chain, from its cocoa plantation in St Lucia and its Engaged Ethics programme in Ghana, to its manufacturing, distribution and retail across 126 stores, including 40 stores in Japan.
“We digitised the learning and development programme across the business, bringing in talent management concepts, appraisals, goal setting, and competency frameworks,” he says.
He also worked for multinational insurance company RSA on large transformational and technology projects for contact centre services, which included stints of living overseas in Cape Town and Bangalore.
“What brought me to Marshall is that I was looking for a new opportunity,” he says. “The learning and development here is more about brokerage of external training partners in areas like leadership, project management, and IT – so hopefully my skills will suit that style of role to make Marshall Skills Academy really successful.”
About Mike
Mike Hannaford has previously worked as an assessor for Cambridge Regional College and, before that, was an instructor with Ryan Air – just before Covid hit. He had also worked for Monarch Airlines.
His aviation background stems from his time with the RAF. “I was an aircraft engineer for Tornado and Chinook, so I was in Iraq and Afghanistan with the military for a while.”
Mike lived in Kabul for several years, attached to the British Embassy with its close protection team, where he would escort diplomats to meetings with the Taliban. He was later injured and had to be repatriated back to the UK.
Since then, Mike has worked on several large overhaul programmes for both the Transport for London and Eurostar.
“Aviation is coming back to life again, which is a real blessing, and being able to come over to Marshall is a real gift,” he says.
While Mike no longer misses rolling around under aircraft engines, he is looking forward to sharing his wealth of experience with the apprentices.
“I trained as an apprentice at RAF Cosford in 1998, and have I learned over the years that there is a right way of doing things and a wrong way of doing things,” he says. “I’m really looking forward to sharing these experiences with the apprentices – you get a positive outcome from it, which I really enjoy.”