Potty Training and Puppy Pads when working

Hi All,

My wife and I recently (after many years of discussion) got a puppy. We brought the pup (female cavachon) home 2 weeks ago and have been trying to potty train since. We work fulltime, however my wife and I work from home on alternate days each week, and the other 3 days we have a dog walker come in at lunch time. She sleeps in a crate and will hold her pee / poop all night, and gets taken out at 6am each morning to do her business. During the day she has her crate and is confined via a pen in which we put down puppy pads. Her bowel movements are a bit random, sometimes for a poop she will go 5 minutes after eating and other times it is 1 hour, it is the same for Peeing.

She knows in her crate to pee on the Puppy Pad (we cover the entire area because she was pooping on the floor), and I am planning to reduce the coverage each week. However, when we are present we leave one puppy pad down with the pen removed but she has a tendency to walk off and pee somewhere else. I am struggling to teach her how to tell us she needs to go. I say 'toilet' everytime we go out. Is it just a matter of patience? I haven't been able to find much advice for potty training when using a pen.