Helping You Access Funding

If you want to reduce the cost of your training, we can help you source and access available funding. Various funded projects have enabled us to support businesses to start up, grow, or develop their people.

Train to Gain Leadership and Management

Up to £1000 for the cost of leadership and management activity is available to support owners/senior managers. The second £500 of this £1000 has to be matched, i.e. for an investment of £1500; a grant of £1000 will be awarded upon receipt of payment evidence (receipted invoice). This is provided you meet the criteria and have not accessed this funding before. For more detail, visit www.traintogain.gov.uk

Women & Work

This project enables female employees to receive £650 of funding towards training to develop and progress their career. This is restricted to sectors where they are under represented. This initiative receives Government funding, matched by employer contribution. If you are interested, contact us or visit the website www.skills4women.co.uk . Rosie Barfoot is a registered Skills Coach with Lantra, the Sector Skills Council for environmental and land based industries.

Case Study

Elizabeth Stockley, Director, Thurnwood Dairy Farm, Dorset.

I took part in the Women & Work project in 2009 to increase my responsibility in the business and improve my management skills. At the start of the course, Managing Performance, we were asked to write down what we wanted to achieve.  I wrote down “I want to get my staff to do as I tell them”.

Six days training later (including Assertive Negotiations and Coaching for Managers) I have now refined my objective to “I want to inspire my staff to act as a team for the benefit of my business”.  By visualising how it would feel if I achieved this, I have been inspired by Rosie and Ken to improve my staff management. Through their patient teaching and some role-play, they have given me the skills and confidence to communicate better with my staff and develop their willingness to help me improve the business to everyone’s benefit.

The training helped me realise that perceptions are important. Whereas I saw myself as being very busy and getting the job done, my team could see me as not caring and not trusting enough to involve them. The first thing I did was to offer praise for a job well done. Seeing the response this evoked was great. It helped me realise that I need to spend more time with each person, and not just speak to them when things were wrong. I have started having weekly one-to-one’s. I learnt that by being open and honest and apologising for my errors, individual’s opened up. Using the questioning techniques learnt on the coaching course, we have begun to have conversations like we never had before.

I have now enroled on the Supervisor’s Toolkit, because I want to learn more.

20 December 2009

We are always looking for other ways to support businesses, so please contact us to find out more.