Maximising Apprenticeships: The OU & KPMG Thought Leadership Guide

End-to-end editorial production for a nationally distributed B2B thought leadership guide, published at the moment of a major UK workforce policy shift.

Outcome

A 28-page thought leadership guide produced in partnership with KPMG, published under The Open University brand, and distributed in print at CIPD conferences and events to HR and L&D leaders across the UK. The piece positioned the BDU as an authoritative voice in the apprenticeship reform conversation at a pivotal moment: the introduction of the Apprenticeship Levy in 2017.

Client

The Open University's Business Development Unit (BDU), the commercial arm of The OU working with corporates, SMEs, and public sector organisations on learning and development.

The brief

The Open University's Business Development Unit needed to establish credibility in the HR and L&D market at exactly the moment the UK government was introducing the Apprenticeship Levy. A policy change that would affect every organisation with a wage bill over £3 million. The BDU had the expertise. The challenge was making it visible and useful to an audience of HR directors, L&D leads, and senior people leaders who were navigating an unfamiliar landscape under time pressure.

The partnership with KPMG added consulting credibility and access to a broader corporate audience. The brief was to produce a guide that was authoritative enough to be taken seriously by senior decision-makers, practical enough to be genuinely useful, and distinctive enough to position The OU as a strategic partner rather than just a course provider.

Strategic considerations

Three tensions shaped the work:

Authority versus accessibility. The OU's natural register was academic and rigorous. The audience needed plain-English guidance they could act on quickly. The guide had to carry genuine intellectual weight without reading like a white paper.

Commercial versus educational framing. The BDU was selling degree apprenticeship programmes, but a guide that read as a sales document would lose the audience immediately. The content had to lead with the employer's problem, not the OU's solution. The product had to earn its place at the end, not lead from the front.

Breadth versus depth. The apprenticeship reform landscape in 2016 and 2017 was genuinely complex: levy mechanics, new standards, qualification levels, provider selection, workforce planning, cultural change. The guide needed to cover enough ground to be useful without becoming a policy document nobody would finish.

Approach

The guide was structured around five employer actions rather than around the policy changes themselves. That decision, to organise the content around what an employer needs to do rather than around what the government has done, was the primary editorial choice and it shaped everything else. It meant the reader's job was always visible, the content always had a practical anchor, and the policy context could serve the employer's perspective rather than the other way around.

The voice work was extensive. Four senior contributors across The OU and KPMG provided input and quotes. Each had a distinct perspective and register. The editorial task was to hold a consistent voice across the guide while letting the contributors' expertise show clearly: authoritative, direct, and commercially grounded without tipping into jargon or self-promotion.

The structure moved from context through the five steps to a forward-looking close, with case examples and data points embedded throughout to support the argument at each stage. I held the full publishing process end to end: content architecture, all written content, editorial standards, design management, proofreading, print production, and distribution. The guide was distributed in print at CIPD conferences and events, placing it directly in the hands of the HR and L&D leaders it was written for.

Impact

Published in late 2016 in advance of the Apprenticeship Levy coming into force in April 2017. Distributed in print at CIPD conferences and events and across the BDU's corporate client base and KPMG's employer network, reaching HR directors, L&D leads, and senior people leaders at the moment they most needed practical guidance on the reforms.

The guide supported the BDU's repositioning as a strategic voice in the workforce development conversation rather than a transactional course provider, and contributed to the content programme that grew the unit's LinkedIn presence to over 5,000 followers organically.

The piece remains a clear example of the editorial infrastructure work that sits behind the Editorial Notebook: the Notebook defined how the BDU would sound and what it would say. This guide was that thinking applied at full scale to a real audience with a real commercial objective.

Read the original guide.

What it taught me

Editorial systems fail when they're treated as documents and succeed when they're treated as infrastructure. The Notebook worked because a contributor could move from worldview through audience through format in a single read, and apply it the same day.

The discipline this engagement taught me, and that has shaped every content system I've built since, is that the test of a content strategy isn't its sophistication. It's whether it survives contact with the people actually making the content. Editorial infrastructure that gets used, adopted, and lasts is worth more than a beautifully designed strategy that quietly fails to embed.