Inspiring Dads Founder Ian Dinwiddy Talks Effective Training Design For Dads At Work
When it comes to learning and training, it’s easy to assume that both words mean exactly the same thing. After all, don’t both lead to gaining new information? Well, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, learning is defined, “as knowledge or skill acquired by instruction or study,” while training is defined as “the skill, knowledge or experience acquired by one that trains.”
While these definitions might sound similar, I see nuance and difference. For me, learning is a general term of information gathering, while training is a specific form of learning delivered with goals designed to bridge certain skill gaps and facilitated by a specialist in a certain field.
Both learning and training depend on each other, and when done right, passive knowledge is turned into wisdom that can be applied. Yet, there can be a massive gap between both, either because trainers miss the mark with making their programmes learner-specific, or the act of learning itself feels like a chore.
Figuring out how to bridge this gap is interesting to me, and it’s led me to want to share the stories of training providers, L&D professionals and e-learning developers.
In this interview, I dive deeper into a subject I’m learning more about every day: fatherhood. Learning how to balance priorities with an energetic daughter named Freya requires a massive learning curve, and it was great to learn about the work of Inspiring Dads founder Ian Dinwiddy.
Ian talks about the kind of work companies need to do to train their HR staff on how to accommodate working dads, the future of paternity leave in the UK and more.
Let’s start with your background. What originally set you on the path towards starting Inspiring Dads?
If I go back to 2010, that’s really where it all began. I became a dad 15 years ago while working as a management consultant. My wife, Lisa, was (and still is) a lawyer. She had six months of fully paid maternity leave; I had two weeks of statutory.
We had no family nearby, so we made a practical decision that when Freya was six months old, I’d stop work and be a stay-at-home dad for nine months. I repeated that when our son, Struan, was born three years later. Those periods gave me a lot of hands-on parenting experience.
Full time consultancy wasn’t something I could easily return to, but I could freelance, which turned out to be an interesting and profitable endeavour, at least in the short term - it was highly dependent on suitable locations and not sustainable in the long term. About the same time Lisa was experiencing coaching through her work, she realised the things I enjoyed—and the things I naturally gravitated towards in consulting—were very similar to the coaching experience: helping people think laterally, solve problems and find better ways forward. That’s how coaching came onto my radar in 2015.
I trained, transitioned into coaching, then into public speaking, training, and workshop development. The through-line was always the same: designing a working life where one of us would “always be there” for the kids. Financially, that person was more likely to be me. The gender pay gap worked in Lisa’s favour from day one, and it’s only widened, so structuring work around her career made sense.
In those early years, what were the biggest barriers to getting traction with Inspiring Dads? And have those challenges changed?
When I started, I focused on coaching men one-to-one. That was tough. The emotional buying cycle for men is slow in that they don’t go from “this is hard” to “I’m going to invest in support” quickly enough to make a B2C consumer-facing model viable.
Before the pandemic, I pivoted to B2B. Companies were beginning to extend paternity leave, offer shared parental leave, and recognise that supporting mothers alone wasn’t enough. So I shifted to supporting new dads inside organisations.
One of the biggest barriers to entry I found was credibility. Becoming a recognised voice in the field takes time. I wrote a lot on LinkedIn, did podcasts, events, anything that helped build a public presence.
The second challenge is that organisations often separate “event budget” from “coaching and long-term development budget.” The person who books a one-off dads’ event is rarely the same person who commissions a coaching programme or culture initiative. Bridging that internal gap is still one of the hardest parts today.
You’ve mentioned the workshops you run. Could you share one or two examples and the results you’ve seen?
My core programme is a five-week group coaching programme called The New Dads Accelerator. I’m currently running it for a group of GPs in London. Participants access content through a portal, then we meet weekly and cover things like what it means to be a good dad, relationship dynamics, mental load and some of the challenges new parents inadvertently create for themselves.
It gives dads a structured moment of reflection at a major transition point. The feedback is consistently strong, especially from second and third-time dads who realise they’ve never stopped to take stock before.
On the organisational side, I also run Fatherhood and the Parental Transition: Tips for Coaching Working Dads, a workshop for managers and coaches supporting new dads. It explores the overlaps and differences in maternity and paternity experiences, and helps managers understand how to offer meaningful support.
The cultural shift shows up in things like dads’ networks forming, senior men speaking openly about parenthood, and increased psychological safety around discussing pressures at home. Once the conversation becomes normalised, you get the early adopters who pave the way for everyone else.
That brings us nicely to training design. In your view, what makes a truly effective programme and what does good implementation look like?
Most organisations drop training into a vacuum. It never lands because the ecosystem isn’t there.
Step one should always be a policy review. If maternity is generous and paternity is two weeks of statutory, you’ve already embedded a two-speed system where only women are effectively treated as “real” parents and working dads are seen as an afterthought. That affects equality, choices, and progression for everyone.
Then you need:
Visible male role models who talk honestly about fatherhood and psychological safety built by leaders modelling vulnerability.
A launch moment. Not just “training appears on the LMS,” but an event that says “We talk about fatherhood here.”
I run a very popular live event called Can Dads Have It All, Why Parenting Out Loud Matters where I blend data and stories with an interactive fireside chat element with 2 or 3 working dads from the organisation. This event helps to position fatherhood within broader work conversations with themes like healthy masculinity.
Leading on from that is a 2 hour workshop called How To Balance Work and Fatherhood: Parenthood In A Changing World that explores elements of what it means to be a good dad, providing both community and tangible tools (everyone wants something practical to take away).
Community is always important; men assume other men aren’t struggling; when at some level they almost always are.
When you create an environment for these kinds of conversations and training elements, that’s when implementation becomes a lot easier because people in the same position are all connecting with each other.
Inspiring Dads’ vision is equal parental leave for all. Given the current situation in the UK, how close are we to seeing that become reality?
Organisations like Dad Shift, the Fatherhood Institute and Pregnant Then Screwed have created real momentum. There’s also a government review of parental leave and pay happening now.
The movement's ask is clear - six weeks of fully paid paternity leave, matching statutory maternity pay. That would be groundbreaking, especially if self-employed parents are included too, because they get no provisions.
According to the Fatherhood Institute, an average-earning dad in the UK who takes two weeks of statutory paternity leave loses over £1,000 compared to their normal earnings, so there’s a key disparity that needs to be addressed.
But we’re in a political climate where anything perceived to cost business gets pushback, even though most of the cost is reclaimable from the government. Economic conditions will be the deciding factor; if things improve in the next year or two, I think policy change becomes more realistic.
There is also some resistance from parts of the women's sector concerned that equalising leave “treats men and women the same.” But the research shows clearly, when leave is equal, women benefit enormously from the support and shared responsibilities at home, both short and long term.
The evidence is overwhelmingly positive. Equalising leave improves:
Gender equality
Parental mental health
Long-term choices for families
Maternal career progression
Father–child bonding
You’re doing your own part to make extended paternity leave a reality with your Parental Leave Benchmark. What is it, and how does it help organisations?
It’s a searchable and growing database of around 480 UK organisations, covering fully paid maternity, paternity, and shared parental leave. You can search and sort by:
Company
Sector
UK employee size
Policy type
Level of generosity
It helps organisations see where they stand relative to their peers. And it helps individuals choose employers aligned with their values around family life.
If you want to compare the offers of Law firms with more than a 1000 employees or Financial Services with fewer than 500 employees you can do that and much more.
Dad Shift uses it strategically to identify companies already offering strong paternity leave. Those firms are natural allies in the campaign for wider reform.
Where do you see Inspiring Dads in the next 5–10 years?
Honestly? I’m 49, and in 10 years I’ll probably be semi-retired. What I’d love is to grow Inspiring Dads to the point where I can employ others to deliver workshops and coaching, while I focus on speaking and advocacy. That would be ideal.
But here’s the reality. I can stay in this field because I’m privileged. My partner earns well and has done for a long time. That lets me keep going in a space where many brilliant men can’t afford to stay because the work isn’t consistent enough.
I’ll absolutely keep going for the next five years. It still feels very much like the beginning. There’s so much still to do.
It’s interesting you mention that you’re privileged based on the amount your partner earns. Do you feel there is still stigma of women being primary earners while men take on the flexible or caregiving role?
There can be. But it really depends on the couple’s starting point.
Research shows that men who start out as the breadwinner and then fall behind their partner can struggle more with the identity shift.. For me, Lisa always earned more and in the past, I’ve had the ‘kept man’ jokes and the banter. It’s something I’ve embraced. Our trajectories were always different. So for us, it’s never been an issue. It’s a collective effort.
What matters is this:
If we want true gender equality in the workplace, we need to show that men can be leaders at home just as much as women can be leaders at work. Parenting needs to be shared and valued equally.