Leadership at every level

At Pearson, we believe that people at every level of our organization can take the lead. We encourage each of our staff to think about their own career aspirations and we try to help them achieve their goals. Outside of formal training programmes, we suggest our people take advantage of cross-function meetings, innovation workshops and ‘lunch and learn’ programmes to further their leadership experience.

We also check that we are doing all we can to motivate our colleagues and give them challenging assignments that expand their repertoire. Everyone has an annual appraisal or performance review so that they can get feedback from colleagues on how they’re doing and set objectives for the future.

Every year, the senior teams in Pearson discuss the talented people across our businesses to make sure we identify the potential future leaders of the company; we set ourselves the target of having at least one successor for each of the top roles across Pearson. Although we may sometimes choose to look externally to get fresh eyes on an old problem or import specific skills, we know we always have people to step into the key Pearson roles if required.

We recognise the need to keep reinventing our company to keep it competitive and vibrant - it’s likely that the challenges our people will be facing in five years’ time do not yet exist. As an international company with world-leading businesses, we need to help our people adapt to those challenges and seize new opportunities.