Learning at Work Week is a superb initiative designed to build workplace learning cultures and highlight the benefits of continual employee development.
Taking place between May 13th to 19th, this year’s LAW Week theme, ‘Learning Power’, focuses on knowledge and learning as a catalyst for personal growth and change, as well as achieving team and organisational goals.
BriggsAmasco is fully supportive of this positive campaign, which is led by Campaign for Learning, and organisational champions. As well as helping boost learning opportunities for employees of all ages nationwide, LAW Week is a chance for us to highlight staff training initiated by BriggsAmasco.
Our employees are our greatest asset, and to this effect we have implemented a range of training programmes from NVQs and apprentices, through to Mental Health Awareness and First Aid courses, in order to boost staff personal development and create a workplace environment in which they feel valued and supported.
With our training programmes, staff can study for degrees in professions including quantity surveying, IEMA (environment and sustainability studies) and Inspector of Record (IOR). Human Resources CIPD qualifications also form part of our personal development strategy.
Currently, we have six trainees and seven apprentices learning and plying their trade throughout the business. We’re proud of our long-established record of nurturing young individuals as they take their first tentative steps along their desired career path. Many of our trainees have progressed to senior positions within the company, using their experience to support apprentices following in their footsteps. This lineage is crucial to not only developing the skills of a new generation of construction-based employees at a time when the UK building trade’s talent pool is known to be shallow, it is vital to enshrining the company’s best practice culture across all areas of the business.
Progression of In-house Training
In terms of the way in-house training culture has progressed throughout the decades, our health and safety programmes have increased exponentially as the construction industry has sharpened its focus on worker protections as its highest priority. Digital data capture and storage has also improved the way we are able to monitor staff health and safety performance to further improve training processes.
The passing years have also seen us place a greater emphasis on safeguarding employees’ mental health awareness with the introduction of a series of exceptionally beneficial professionally-prescribed courses. Once something of a taboo subject, the building industry fully acknowledges that employees are more susceptible to mental stresses and strains than other professions due to construction’s unrelenting physical demands. BriggsAmasco has appointed more than 20 qualified mental health first aiders from its staffing pool. It means for anyone struggling with personal or work-based problems, a colleague is available to confide in and help ease mental burdens.
There is no doubt that campaigns such as LAW Week are the way forward for creating a contented, motivated, productive workforce. Hence, we will continue to provide training and personal development programmes that are commensurate with employee needs, giving staff the best possible chance to thrive in their day-to-day duties for their long-term fulfilment and success.