The Learning & Skills Council (LSC) London Central, a public body that invests £320m a year in vocational training for adults and young people, is being recognised for its internal staff development.

The council and its training partner, Hartnell Training Ltd, have gained a place in the finals of the National Training Awards 2005 for the £21,000 invested in training for 32 of the LSC London Central’s Workforce Development team. The staff trained in facilitation skills, influencing and managing relationships to give them the skills to take on bigger training projects.

Before the training, the team was driven by a volume approach to skills investments – handling over 100 small projects, often reacting as organisations with training ideas approached the LSC for support.

“This was a time-consuming approach, which did not actively identify sustainable investments or take a long term view of what we wanted to fund,” said Tony Nelson, Director of Skills & Workforce Development of the LSC London Central. “Staff lacked the skills to shape the publicly funded training market to meet employer needs.”

The training was delivered against a background of change in which the LSC London Central was restructuring, with major changes in job roles and a 20% reduction in headcount.

Staff undertook a six-day workshop for staff in high performance team dynamics, action planning, transactional analysis, building rapport, networking and information gathering.
“The team has been reorganised, refocused and retrained over 15 months,” said Nelson. “Evaluation of the intervention has shown 88% of the team and 100% of managers increased their effectiveness and has recorded favourable comments from external stakeholders.”

Using what they had learned, the team was able to manage an additional 81 Investor in People recognitions and raise the total of other skills outputs from 227 to 1,312. They also managed to reduce the unit cost of training by £3,931.

Nelson added: “We have met our purpose and indeed exceeded the learner expectations from the programme, demonstrated LSC London Central and employer community benefits reaching an additional 1,085 employers. We have shown value for money in training delivery as well as generating a 274% increase in LSC London Central purchasing power as the new skills were applied.”
LSC