It has been a great pleasure of ours to host quite a few Insight days since we started working with the Swindon and Wiltshire Growth Hub.

This wonderful organisation’s sole purpose is to help businesses thrive, and their dedicated team has offered us a wealth of resources and support since we joined. As well as fantastic networking events and training programmes, they put us in touch with some local schools who were looking to offer their students Insight days.

Insight days (and Challenge days) aim to provide work experience for students in a unique and impactful way. Instead of hosting one student for a week, they ask businesses to welcome a group of students for a single day, offering them a glimpse into the professional world and our industry.

This initiative started in our region last year by the Growth Hub and it’s been so successful, it’s been rolled out nationwide.

We recently hosted a local school of SEND children and gave them the opportunity to carry out a stock control task, and to race our remote-controlled forklift toys around a track.  They also all had the opportunity to operate the real thing and absolutely loved the experience.  The headteacher said the following:

”An amazing inclusive experience that our students haven’t stopped talking about! One student hasn’t even taken his hi viz off through the heatwave as he is so proud! A day that opened our eyes to what our students can achieve and aspire to; we were so proud of their listening skills, courage and confidence and cannot thank Key Performance Training enough for making us so welcome and for being so flexible”.

Not only did the students have fun, but we had so much fun ourselves!  Our normal days are pretty focused on course delivery, so it is really nice to have a bit of fun, welcome so amazing young people into the centre, and to inspire and shape the future workforce of Swindon and Wiltshire. Anything we can do to pay back to the local community by supporting students’ career development is time well spent by us.

We are looking forward to hosting the next one next week, and we would highly recommend any business who wants to share the enjoyment you have for your industry with the next generation, to get involved.   

We were delighted this week to complete our very first Skills Bootcamp.  For those unfamiliar with them, they are free, flexible courses of up to 16 weeks, giving people the opportunity to build up sector-specific skills and an offer of an interview with an employer upon completion. 

They are delivered through local councils to ensure this funding is used in areas where local businesses are struggling to fill vacancies. 

This current wave of delivery focused on Transport and Logistics, and Leadership and Management, amongst others, so we were delighted to be able to work with Wiltshire Council to deliver some of this training for our local people, and to help our local economy grow through employment.

We ran a Level 2 NVQ programme focusing on Warehouse skills and Forklift Operations, with the added bonus of being able to include both the Counterbalance and the Reach truck certification – something we’ve never been able to deliver before.

Our first 6 students finished the 15-day training programme with us this Tuesday 24th June, with 2 of them having had interviews and one has had 2 job offers already!  Our next cohort of 6 started with us on Wednesday 25th June and will finish mid-July.

Once our Level 2 Transport and Logistics programme has finished, we’ll be running our Level 3 Leadership and Management in Logistics Skills Bootcamp.  We have places for 18 students, and we’ll start at the end of July, running one day a week for 13 weeks.  We’ll be focusing on skills such as leading teams, planning change and motivating to improve performance, and the course will be run all face-to-face.

If you are a business and you have staff that would benefit from upskilling in this area, then you may be able to access our co-funded option, where the government pay 70% of the course and your business pays the balance of 30%.

We’ll keep you informed if more funding becomes available for future Skills Bootcamps, but in the meantime, we are still planning to run our funded training programme through New College Swindon, starting back up again in August hopefully. To see the details about these courses, please see our funded training page here. 

For more information about this course and Skills Bootcamps in general, please let us know and we’ll be delighted to help you.