Funding for Staff Training Programmes

No train, no gain

Oct 05 2009

Staff training can benefit your business

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Now might not seem like the obvious time to invest in staff training programmes. But doing so can have huge benefits to your business – and the good news is there’s funding available.

According to the National Institute of Adult Continuing  Education, companies with a high level of training are likely to grow at a faster rate and achieve above average profitability. The body found that increasing the proportion of employees trained by five per cent is linked to a four per cent increase in productivity.

Rachel Clacher, co-founder of outsourced reception company, Moneypenny, is a firm believer in the power of staff training. ‘It has played a fundamental part in our growth. And our staff turnover is negligible as a result of the programmes we’ve put in place,’ she says.

‘When we were a small company, we were doing a lot of our training on a one-to-one basis as we were going along. But when we started to grow, we needed to formalise that into a training scheme.’

For Thomas Vollrath, CEO of hosting company Webfusion, implementing training schemes were imperative to the future success of his company when it relocated from Nottingham to London.

‘At that time we had a staff turnover of 100 per cent, so moving had a profound upheaval on our business. When we first started out in London we had very low service rates, with only 29 per cent of enquiries getting resolved. Once we hired more people, we decided to address the symptoms of the service problem,’ he says.

Not only did Vollrath create a training department and introduce structured courses, but it’s also put 35 members staff members through NVQ programmes. Now the company’s service level is 92 per cent and its staff turnover levels are the lowest in more than two years.

‘There were pragmatic reasons for putting our staff through NVQ programmes because we got funding, but there are still big time costs involved,’ he says.

Nevertheless, Vollrath says the advantages far outweigh any expense – a reason he decided to increase the numbers of staff taking NVQs this year despite the recession.

‘Of course they are skills you can pick up on the job, but having them demonstrated by an expert can be very powerful and has a huge effect on people’s understanding of best practice,’ he says.

Where to go for funding

Visit the government’s Train to Gain website to get put in touch with a local skills broker, who will assess your businesses’ training needs.

The funding is mainly assigned to the learner themselves rather than the organisation so the training provider deals with all the funding applications directly, making it relatively easy from the employer’s perspective.