Building category management and store leadership capability at Sapphirefood

Sapphirefood approached the corporate learning desk with a capability problem in category management and store leadership. The presenting symptom was category decisions being made on last season's instinct while the customer data sat unused in three separate systems.

Discovery ran across three sessions with the L&D team and the business heads who owned the gap. The population in scope came to 2,247 employees, spread across levels, which ruled out a single course and pointed towards a levelled structure.

We built a role-level competency matrix with the Sapphirefood HR team and baselined the population against it before any content was written. 7 programmes were then designed against that matrix, each module traceable to a named competency.

Delivery ran in 5 waves so the business was never short-staffed, with roughly 157 line managers briefed on what their teams were being asked to do differently. Every live session was recorded, and the schedule was built around the retail operating calendar rather than faculty convenience.

Cohort completion settled at 90%, measured as learners who cleared every assessment, not as learners who attended. The same competency instrument used at baseline was repeated at the close of each wave.

The end-of-engagement review with the sponsor covered movement against baseline, the effect on sell-through on managed categories, and — as in every iAdmit review — the design decisions that did not work and were changed between waves.