Wider Skills Courses

We deliver two versions of this session. One for those being appraised and one for those doing the appraising. We can also add in your specific appraisal processes to ensure that the entire workforce is fully prepared and trained on your annual performance management system.

The course also highlights a number of approaches and a wealth of techniques and tactics to ensure that the appraisal process is structured, productive and positive and is welcomed by both appraiser and appraisees.

This two day workshop is designed for those who aspire to take the next step in their career and become managers.

The course focuses on the core nuts and bolts of day to day management including: performance management, workforce and task planning, how to motivate, process/policy management, managing bad behaviour and sickness/absence management.

The course is designed to light a fire of excitement into the bellies of those who want to take the next step in your organisation.

If you have people in your organisation who feel that they would like to improve how they communicate with others to achieve greater impact, or those who feel that their behaviour is too passive or too aggressive, this course will help them find the right balance to any given situation.

Our interactive, practical and informative course will help people develop their assertiveness skills in all aspects of work and personal life. It’ll help them to understand and use the tools of assertiveness and help them to develop self-esteem and communication skills leading to more assertive and effective performance.

Confidence is a key soft skill – without it, no other skills are fully realised and our potential as individuals or teams is held back. It’s essential for any professional to be able to handle themselves confidently in the workplace. This full day course provides individuals and teams with the understanding, tools and confidence to adopt new ways of handling themselves and approaching professional situations, through managing and channelling anxiety effectively.

We deliver two versions of this course. A workshop for managers who want to build resilience within their team and another version for individuals who wish to build their own personal resilience.

Both courses focus on the demands of the current working environment which ask you to do more with less. Being able to manage your energy and emotional state increases your ability to respond to this pressure.

This course will help you and/or your teams raise your awareness of stress, pressure and challenge, and recognise your own resilience strategies. You will also gain the skills to actively integrate new techniques to build resilience and enable optimal performance at work.

This beginners level course gives delegates a good, solid understanding of the differences between coaching and mentoring. We’ll introduce tools such as the GROW model, help the delegates to identify how to set appropriate goals using the SMART technique of goal setting and give them a outline of how a coach/mentor relationship should build and sustainably work.

Collaborative working has never been more important. The pace of change is accelerating, the challenges organisations face are more numerous and more complex and this is all amplified by new technology and new ways of working. Familiar ways of working are less and less effective.

Thankfully, the smart organisations get it. They understand that to move forward, we must work in collaboration with others to help us become more agile, more efficient and more effective.

This course is focused on identifying the key principles that will build a foundation for effective collaborative working.

In order to protect valuable frontline services and ensure positive outcomes for local communities, the need for councils to think more commercially has never been more important. Our commercial skills training for local government officers session is designed to enhance your people’s ability to formulate commercial strategies, assess the financial health of your department, deal with commercial partners and improve negotiation skills and to network with commercial officers from across local government.

When it comes to customer service excellence, our course gets away from the usual customer service dos and don’ts. The usual off the shelf customer service workshops are perfect for restaurants, shops, theatres and reception staff, but it’s a completely different ball game for us in local government. Our full day session will help your teams to learn strategies that enable us to focus on what the customer wants rather than relying on what we think the customer wants, understand the difference between disappointment and dissatisfaction, learn about expectations and the control we gain when the correct level of expectations are set, identify the importance of creating different customer profiles and seeing the bigger picture of why brilliant customer service excellence is so important to our sector.

Our interactive course will provide insights and techniques on how to make effective decisions.

In the workplace you may need to make decisions and resolve problems frequently. While many of your decisions are not so important, some are potentially life changing so learning how to use effective strategies and tools will help you to make the right decisions at the right time.

This course provides you with essential skills such as problem solving techniques and models, identifying options to achieve accurate decision-making and distinguishing root causes and symptoms.

Being able to communicate well is fundamental to your success in life and at work. When we communicate well with someone, we just click, we really connect with them and it feels that we really get along!

Often, we don’t think about how we communicate, we simply do it. We usually just type an email and send it, without giving a second thought about how it’s going to be received. But what happens when it goes wrong? When the process doesn’t go so smoothly, we feel that people just don’t ‘get us’, and it can be confusing to understand why.

During this session we help delegates to learn how to get their message across in the best way possible in both the verbal and written formats. We tune into some important listening skills, we discover the secrets of body language, and what messages you are really giving out.

Sometimes referred to as EQ, emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of and to manage emotions and relationships. This course will help you develop your EQ helping you to understand how much of a pivotal factor it is in developing personal and professional success.

When we look at the truly extraordinary people who inspire and make a difference you will see that they do this by connecting with people at a personal and emotional level. This is their emotional intelligence.

By the end of this full day course we will develop your self-awareness, self-management, ability to influence and understanding of how to have impact in a social environment.

Do you want to train a group of people to be able to resolve conflict either within, or for, your organisation? If so, our beginners’ workshop could really help. It gives your delegates a thorough insight into the psychology of conflict and builds confidence and competence in putting some mediation skills to use straight away.

After the course, delegates will understand what mediation is and isn’t, and how it gets used in the workplace. They will be armed with a step-by-step process, an understanding of how to deal with disruptive behaviour in resolution meetings and most importantly, knowing when to quit; referring situations on for other types of intervention.

All organisations have members of staff who are expected to work on their own, away from the office in sometimes isolated communities or in other people’s homes. This course will give your lone workers a good understanding of how to take personal safety in a lone working context seriously.

We’ll focus on dynamic risk assessments – including identifying risks related to all aspects of work. Tracing systems – ensuring staff are traceable in case of an emergency. Home visits – best practice for staying safe while conducting a home visit. Travelling safely – tips for safety on various methods of transport.

Within our sector, relationships are continuously being forged between senior council officers and leading councillors. Using our extensive experience of working with leading councillors, we have a suite of political awareness and acumen courses that are suited for entry level officers right through to senior managers. All versions are perfectly tailored to assist officers in establishing and maintaining a positive working relationship with lead politicians.

As with all of our workshops, the course delivers the perfect blend of interactive learning, case studies, direct experience, scenarios and video role-plays based on real life critical incidents to provide you with the political acumen you need to develop your career further. All participants will take away practical advice and in-depth expertise on how to take their political acumen skills to the next level.

If your organisation is about to undergo a reorganisation, our preparing for interview skills programme will be worth implementing. Our ½ day workshop gives each delegate a great understanding of what to say, do and deliver in a formal interview process, giving them every opportunity to be the best version of themselves on the day of selection.

Public speaking is often rated as one of the biggest fears people have. If your people need to give presentations then this interactive and practical workshop will build their confidence and improve their techniques in making both formal and less formal presentations.

Some of the topics included on the course include how to effectively plan for your presentation, how to build confidence, how to grab an audience’s attention, how to maintain their interest, how to get the best out of visual aids and how to handle questions and tricky audience members.

Giving a presentation to a committee of councillors can be a daunting task even to the most experienced of presenters. This workshop focuses on the specific influencing skills needed when presenting to elected members and it will build confidence and improve on delivery techniques.

Some of the topics included on the course include how to effectively plan for your presentation, how to build confidence, how to grab an audience’s attention, how to maintain their interest, how to get the best out of visual aids and how to handle questions and tricky audience members.

Public speaking has a very close alliance with “presenting” which focuses mainly on how to deliver a professional message. Public speaking is more about the persuasion of the audience and the ability to hold a group’s attention in an entertaining and informative way.

This course will improve your public speaking skills by giving you the tools to identify what your audience is expecting from you. It’ll also give you hints and tips on how to keep an audience engaged, when to use and when not to use humour, how to ensure you hammer your message home and how to bring an effective public speech to an end.

A stakeholder can be defined, in simple terms, as any person or organisation whose behaviour or actions will have an impact on a result.

This one day course aims to help attendees identify their stakeholders; learn how to establish behavioural styles, understand the relationship between the style and their own and use this knowledge to build a strong working partnership that gets results.

This course introduces time management tools and techniques that allow participants to manage their time more effectively and feel more in control.

The training also enables delegates to identify areas of their job where time could be better utilised and the actions necessary to alleviate problems identified. By the end of the training, attendees will have identified their biggest ‘time stealers’, acquired practical time management skills for scheduling, planning and prioritising work, discussed and practised a range of recognised time management techniques such as effective delegation, assertively saying ‘no’ and negotiating alternative solutions.

On this workshop your delegates will learn the essential skills and techniques required to work as an inspirational trainer. Whether they’ll be training staff within your organisation in the future or customers from other organisations, this workshop will cover the essential skill areas, using a highly interactive and practical approach.

Some of the learning objectives of this two session include, meeting people’s needs and expectations, making learning and development engaging and memorable, handling questions and interruptions, understanding group dynamics, recognising learning styles and designing training / lesson plans.