Applications to join the April 2025 cohort of the Associate Programme are now closed. Register your interest for the October 2025 cohort here!

Learning and Development

Overview

Beyond what's learnt whilst at placements, the Friday learning & development journey will help you to become a leader who can bring about transformation in our economy.

We want to help you diagnose what’s going wrong with the economy now and help you think about what a just and regenerative economic system might look like. Crucially, we want to set you up to be people who keep learning and developing through your career - the On Purpose Associate Programme is just the first step.

Core Pillars

The programme is built around two core pillars, Impact and Leadership. We want to give you the motivation and frameworks that will help you think critically about how to increase your impact and deliver change that's systemic rather than surface level, as well as the leadership skills that will help you lead change in yourself, your organisations, and beyond. These will enable you to:

  • Understand the impact sector and commit to its potential to achieve systemic change
  • Gain comprehensive professional skills alongside social sector knowledge and experience
  • Investigate a range of approaches to defining, measuring, resourcing and scaling impact.
  • Exercise and explore your leadership potential and develop a sense of purpose, momentum and direction

Learning Blocks

We are consistently refreshing and renewing the learning and development programme to ensure that it's as helpful and transformative as it can be. There may well be some new modules and sessions by the time you join the programme, but it will broadly cover the topics set out in our 8 learning modules below:

  • Defining and Measuring Impact

    What changes do you want to see in the world? How do organisations know if they are realising their mission? Here we first look at defining impact before exploring approaches and tools to measure and evaluate impact.

  • Financing and Resourcing Impact

    Finding funds is an important first step to achieving impact. You explore different types of funding available to purpose-driven organisations, debate their effectiveness and learn how to secure funding.

  • Scaling impact

    Given the enormity of the world’s problems, it’s important for impactful organisations to scale. You will learn about different tools and strategies that can enable scaling, and debate if and when they should be used.

  • The Impact Landscape

    You explore the state of the sector: its challenges, opportunities and the different ways people create change on a local, national and global level. Within this landscape, you consider where you as an individual are best placed to create change.

  • Leading Projects

    We equip you with a range of approaches to deliver innovative and effective solutions. From traditional problem solving techniques to agile working and human centred design, you broaden your toolkit for tackling complex problems.

  • Leading Self

    If you don’t have a good understanding of yourself, it’s much harder to lead others effectively. Here, you improve your self-awareness and ability to manage your time and energy effectively.

  • Leading Teams

    How do you lead a team through uncertainty, challenge, conflict or even opportunity? Here you learn how to create a strong and inclusive organisational culture, listen deeply, and develop others.

  • Leading Societies

    Once you’re equipped with tools for leading a team, we’ll look wider. From vision casting to community building, you learn how to mobilise people in society to join you in creating change.

Many of the things we cover in these modules will intersect with each other and with other parts of the programme - we want to develop leaders who think systemically, understanding how different issues and ideas connect with each other and create change in new, sometimes unpredictable ways. 

We will explore many different frameworks and schools of thought throughout the year - so arrive on Fridays ready to explore, be challenged, and participate actively in the learning that you'll do.

Meet Our Trainers

Our trainers come from across the impact sector and beyond - expect to hear from social entrepreneurs, climate researchers, leadership coaches, communications experts, and many more!