OLS, based in Doncaster, first contacted the Growth Hub to attend business growth workshops before formally signing up to our Scale Up programme.
The SCR Scale-Up initiative, is aimed at accelerating the growth of high-potential businesses through peer focused business learning, group working and industry insight. It is focussed on supporting established businesses to grow where they are ambitious to achieve high levels of growth and is an initiative delivered in collaboration with the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University and the SCR Growth Hub.
After completing Scale-Up, OLS successfully applied for four of their engineers to go through the Skills Bank programme.
OLS Ltd, who provide high-quality professional security services to businesses, secured BTEC level 3 certificates for their engineers in IT and networking for security, and access control installing.
Claire Law, Commercial Director of OLS, said: “Qualifications in security are few and far between and so by achieving a level of training, we are showing our customers that we have a very high level of expertise.
“Training and qualifications in security systems and controls are costly, so to have the funding support, on top of the bespoke support around finding and accessing the training itself, from Skills Bank was brilliant.
“By upskilling our engineers, it shows that we are eager to progress our staff and not sit still. Before Skills Bank we had brought people in-house to provide training, or apply for free training. But they didn’t provide either the right level of skills nor the level of tailor-made training we were after,
“The engineers who completed the programme are rightly proud that they’ve come through the training and now possess the skills and qualifications to progress within the company.
“Training and upskilling is a key part of our five-year growth plan which we implemented last year. The support from Skills Bank meant we surpassed our annual targets comfortably.
“The level of support we got from the Growth Hub, and in particular Anne Wilson, our Skills Advisor, was fantastic. She was able to help every step of the way; came in to visit, helped arranged us meeting Calderdale College and training providers, and really helped the who process run smoothly.
“We are still in contact with Anne and the team and are really interested in looking at more opportunities for training, upskills and events.”