Providing Our Team With The Skills & Knowledge To Shine

As a Living Wage Foundation employer and an active member of the Equality Register Thomas Kneale can fairly claim that our people are indeed our greatest asset. The TK team is well-resourced, seasoned and experienced, averaging a decade of service each, even more for most.

We work with Aspire Recruitment, a not-for-profit enterprise who truly understand our company culture and match candidates to us with a focus on the long term unemployed, young people and those who are disadvantaged.

Giving Our Customers The Best Service & Experience Through Staff Training

Keeping colleagues up to date and upskilled on technical and soft skills has always been important, however this has normally been a piecemeal process with no central point to find training opportunities.

In 2022, having grown our involvement with The GC Business Growth Hub over several years, we became aware of a part of their offering called the Skills for Growth SME Support programme, which is designed to “help businesses in Greater Manchester to identify key skills gaps, improve productivity and explore the opportunity for growth”.

Ultimately, this brought access to a portal containing a vast number of training courses and short skills development modules in to one place. It also came with a dedicated skills coach, who would guide each colleague through a 6 month time window to understand their training priorities, recommend appropriate options, and support them the whole way through.

A large proportion of the TK team signed up and took part in the programme, much of which is fully funded, and we have seen significant progress, with reports of increased confidence and efficiency, through to a boost in turnover and customer satisfaction.

Spreading The Word To Those Who Are Not In The Know……

We have been based in Manchester from when we were founded in 1947, through to the present day. Over that time, we have grown our network, become involved in all kinds of business groups, and shared ideas and best practice with others.

As a result, we wanted to not simply benefit ourselves on what the Skills for Growth programme provided us at Thomas Kneale, but how other SME’s across Central Manchester could also benefit. We partnered with the team at Business Growth Hub to be profiled in a video case study about our experiences which can be seen below:

There is something for everyone on the programme, and we would be happy to speak to any SME’s in the GM area who would be interested in partaking in this themselves, and answer any questions that they may have.