Workers offered training for redundancy

WORKERS at small businesses in Birmingham are being offered the opportunity to develop high-level skills, including those people whose jobs are at risk of redundancy.

The Workforce Skills training project is offering NVQ Level 4 courses in management, business & administration as well as health and social care to emphasise to businesses the value of having a trained and skilled workforce.

Funded by the West Midlands Councils’ and Skills Funding Agency’s regional European Social Fund (ESF) programme, the work-based training initiative, offers training to individuals and SMEs.

The training has been tailored to accommodate employers who face making redundancies by ensuring that affected staff get the help they need to get another job, improve qualifications and upgrade skills.

Cllr Phil Atkins, chairman of the West Midlands Councils, said: “This initiative aims to provide support to people whose jobs are at risk, while they are still employed. In doing so we hope to help them to bridge the gap to a new job and a new future.”

Delivered by local training provider, Future Training 2000, the initiative is aiming to provide support and training to about 250 local employees in SMEs in Birmingham, Solihull and the Black Country.

Riaz Khan, Birmingham and Black Country team manager at POhWER, which provides a range of advocacy services to the public in the region and throughout the UK, said: “We chose this pathway to training because it gave us an opportunity to provide staff with recognised qualifications and significant opportunities for personal development; an area POhWER regards as critical to empowering our staff.

“The training has proved invaluable to our team, and has really increased the confidence of many of the employees.”