Do you want to give your strategic plans the best chance of becoming a success?

Having confident, qualified, competent staff is key to setting strategic plans into motion and turning them into success stories.

With staff that are trained and highly skilled, you can delegate more to them, they are more productive and efficient, they take less sick days, they have greater dedication and commitment to their work, and they produce overall better results for your organisation.

How Would We Recommend That You Develop Your Staff?

In this economical climate, we have recommended funded training to our clients time and time again and seen them get fantastic results from the programmes.

With funded training, the programmes are often accredited and are more robust and comprehensive. You get a lot of value-for-money with funded training as it has to adhere to strict standards set by industry trailblazers, making the programmes very much fit-for-purpose and, as long as you choose a good, reputable provider with proven results, high quality.

How Does This Work?

Levy-paying organisations (companies with an annual wage bill of over £3million) have to pay 0.5% of their annual wage bill into a levy pot. The funds in this levy pot are then available for the organisation to spend on apprenticeship training for their staff. 

This means that you can train your staff at no extra cost as your organisation has to pay into the levy whether you plan to utilise the funds or not – so you may as well make use of them and upskill your staff!

Organisations have 24 months to spend their levy pot otherwise the funds automatically go to the government so, if you have unspent levy funding and are interested in training, we highly recommend exploring apprenticeships as soon as possible to avoid losing those funds.

Non-levy employers fall into the governments co-investment funding model, meaning that the ESFA provides funding for 95% of the cost of the programme, meaning your organisation only pays 5%. 

For example, a Level 5 Operational Management Apprenticeship costs £7,000pp but, as a non-levy employer, you are only required to pay £350pp – the remaining £6,650 is funded by the ESFA.

What Programmes Are There to Choose From?

There are countless apprenticeship providers as well as standards and frameworks to choose from.

Here is the official Register of Approved Training Providers: https://download.apprenticeships.education.gov.uk/

Here are a few examples of the different areas that you can train your staff in through an apprenticeship:

• Care Services
• Catering and Hospitality
• Construction
• Engineering and Manufacturing
• Legal, Finance and Accounting

If this is something that you are considering, just to let you know at Nine Dots, we provide five different apprenticeships, all eligible for government-funding:

• Level 3 Team Leader
• Level 5 Operational Manager
• Level 4 Sales Executive
• Level 3 Customer Service Specialist
• Level 3 Human Resources Support Staff

Series Summary

In our “Setting Your Strategic Plans into Motion” series, we have covered how to set strategic goals, how to use your time effectively to work towards these goals, and how to develop your staff to give your organisation goals the best chance of succeeding.

With these three things, you should be in a great position to be able to turn your strategic plans into success stories.

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Next up on The Daily Dot, we will be talking about the true value of emotional intelligence.
We hope you have enjoyed this series and got some value from the articles and resources.
Until next time...