The Group’s longest-established business is City & Guilds. City & Guilds provides vocational qualifications, learning resources, assessment and accreditation to colleges and training providers to equip people with the skills to drive business and economic growth. City & Guilds qualifications and learning programmes are available across 26 industries and on six continents. Over the past 5 years there have been an average of over 2 million City & Guilds learners each year.

One of City & Guilds’ key learning programmes is apprenticeships. Apprenticeships combine on-the-job experience with elearning to make sure apprentices gain the skills needed to move onto the next job. Taking part in these programmes helps organisations build a more qualified and better-trained workforce with the right skills for the job. City & Guilds offers the widest choice in the UK with over 135 frameworks available. Our apprenticeships are seen as the benchmark in key industries – from agriculture to engineering, management to hairdressing.

The City & Guilds Group businesses also include ILM, Kineo, The Oxford Group and Digitalme. Our businesses currently operate in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific. We have more than 10,000 approved training centres and partners worldwide.

Together, our group of businesses set the standards for work-based and corporate learning, on-the-job development, and skills recognition around the world. We make skills and careers portable.

We know our products work; from vocational qualifications, learning resources and assessments through elearning and learning technologies, to accreditation and training delivery. And we continue to expand the range of our products through acquisitions. We also invest in exciting new ventures that support the future of skills development.

For example:

• Through Kineo we offer award winning elearning which 95% of clients have rated as 'excellent' or 'very good'. Kineo is also consistently ranked as a top 20 service provider by trainingindustry.com and the Totara Learning Management System is used by more than 7 million elearners worldwide.
• We are the internationally recognised standard for vocational qualifications through City & Guilds and ILM. It is estimated that since 2000 over 20 million people have received a qualification from the Group.
• 95,000 managers took an ILM qualification in the year ending 31 August 2016 with one million supported to date, including management apprenticeships which focus on developing practical leadership skills through a combination of on-the-job and theory-based training. 
• We offer leadership training and coaching from The Oxford Group, which delivers measurable business results for our clients in over 60 countries and in 29 languages through a global network of over 200 leadership training consultants.
• Digitalme offers digital credentialing services including open badges for young people to share their skills in a digital world.
• We conduct international research to inform skills development and provision.
• We offer expert opinion on global skills development issues such as the future of work and learning, skilled labour mobility and productivity.

• Governments: to provide vocational education systems that meet regional skills needs and ultimately lead to growing economies.
• Learning providers: to provide centre support and consultancy services that lead to cost savings and increased efficiencies.
• Employers: to provide validation of candidates’ skills, effective corporate learning and accreditation of learning and development programmes that lead to more productive workforces and increased efficiencies.
• Senior executives: to provide leadership training and coaching that lead to more capable and inspiring managers and measurable business results.
• Individual learners: to provide industry-recognised, market leading qualifications and credentials that lead to more confident and work-ready candidates.

We value equality, diversity and inclusion in our employees, and we have positive plans in place to improve in these areas as an organisation. We launched an equality, diversity and inclusion programme that includes improving data and benchmarking by making changes to our recruitment strategy, raising awareness in the organisation and communicating our progress to employees. Currently 48.1% of the managers in our Group functions, Support Services and City & Guilds, ILM and Kineo businesses are female and 13.8% are from Black, Asian, Minority, and Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds. Our focus areas are to increase the number of BAME individuals in management positions (currently 5.7%), to increase the number of applications of individuals with multiple barriers to enter the workplace (currently 2.5%), and to increase the number of staff who have declared all the relevant personal data (currently 67%) so that we have a complete picture of our organisation.

We completed our first milestone to improve data and benchmarking by launching a campaign asking employees to anonymously log data about age, gender, ethnicity and disability so that we have 100% completion. We have also chosen to partner with Business in the Community (BITC) to submit our data for benchmarking to assess our organisation based on gender, race, age diversity and employee wellbeing, and we plan to publish our progress each year going forward. 

We have worked to lessen the barriers in our recruitment process by removing the requirement for applicants to have qualifications, and have signed up to the Armed Forces Covenant to support members of the Armed Forces community. We have also set up a working group to review our current recruitment and employment processes and policies to see what we do well, what we can do better, and how we compare to other organisations.

We offer many sustainable initiatives to help our people maximise their impact on the community including organising staff volunteering days and matching charitable donations. Each employee is allowed to take three days per year for volunteering and we match donations up to £200 per employee, which helped us reach 22 charities.  Due to these initiatives, 186 employees volunteered in their local communities, providing 1302 hours of service. In addition, City & Guilds employees spent 560 hours attending The Skills Show to engage with young people.

We provide a wide range of personal development tools including the same programmes we offer to our customers via Kineo’s elearning platform Totara. In addition to offering a huge library of elective elearning topics, all employees must also regularly take anti-bribery training as part of a zero-tolerance policy towards bribery and corruption.  We also take a zero-tolerance approach toward modern slavery, which applies to all people working for the Group in any capacity, as well as our suppliers.

We were proud to provide 75 work experience placements across our businesses which is nearly six placements for every 100 employees.  Our other youth engagement programmes included 10 Career Ready intern placements and 105 open days. These programmes give young people an insight into the world of work by placing them in a real work environment. Last year we also had our first international work experience placement when a young man travelled from South Africa to London to gain valuable experience in top kitchens with support from one of our Fellows.

In addition to our work experience programme, we offered several apprentice positions across the Group last year in areas such as IT, Operations, Marketing, Legal and Corporate Relations. Many of our apprentices progress onto their next job within the Group at the end of the programme.

Our Apprentice Connect programme lets current and former apprentices act as ambassadors and deliver sessions in schools, colleges and careers events to engage with young people, explain what apprenticeships are like and how they are a proven route to future careers. 77 ambassadors reached 10,506 young people through the Apprentice Connect programme.

In October 2015 we acquired Nine Lanterns, an elearning provider based in Australia. Nine Lanterns are online learning experts, which helps us bolster the Group’s position in the Pacific by becoming part of Kineo’s Pacific operation, and allows us to offer high quality elearning to employers.

We were also excited to welcome Digitalme to the Group in June 2016, to expand our offer to include digital credentialing. Using Open Badge technology, Digitalme provides digital badges which are fast becoming the global standard for capturing and communicating skills across the web. Open Badges offer a way to validate individuals’ learning and translate it into a valuable currency to support learners to unlock opportunities in education and employment.

We invest in order to accelerate the growth of innovative education and training by supporting the businesses of entrepreneurs who are committed to innovative skills development. We provide funding in return for an equity stake in the business and recipients also benefit from our expertise and resources to help get their ideas off the ground. Our New Venture Fund recipients included Credly, Filtered and GetMyFirstJob:

• Credly is a US-based digital credentialing services provider that currently works with many organisations including Adobe, New York’s MoMA, Yale University, Harvard, and the Smithsonian Institute.
• Filtered is an online training platform that personalises learning material for each user by using algorithms to filter out things a user doesn't need or already knows to reduce the time spent training.  It has grown quickly since its formation in 2009, serving 700,000 users. The Group now offers Filtered elearning to employees for skills training.
• GetMyFirstJob is the UK’s leading online apprenticeship matching service with just under 300,000 registered users and thousands of applications processed each month.

We invest in new products and services and improve existing products and services to constantly increase the quality of our offer to customers. We invested in the following product developments:

• City & Guilds TechBac: an innovative approach to skills-based education for 14-19 year olds in the UK, designed to bridge the gap between education and employment. Developed with employers and education providers, TechBac provides a high quality experience for learners, offering a unique mix of technical and workplace skills and behaviours. The programme helps learners to feel more confident and ready for work, and gives employers the skilled and work-ready recruits they need. 137 of our technical qualifications are now approved by the Department for Education and we plan to launch new performance measures and technical levels this year.  We continued to develop TechBac and it is now supported by many employers across various industries such as EDF Energy, Bosch, RSPCA, Microsoft and Samsung
• PIVOT: a product from Kineo that provides a simple way for businesses to deliver, manage and track delivery of apprenticeships, featuring an easy-to-use front-end for the learner backed by a suite of eportfolio and assessor tools for the organisation. A robust funding engine also tracks and manages Skills Funding Agency submissions. Compass Group’s use of PIVOT helped raise its Ofsted levels and increased the amount of qualifications it could deliver within its training budget by 50%. Capita Talent Partnership, KFC and Tesco are three other large organisations which now use PIVOT to deliver workplace training.
• Management Plus: a combination of award-winning learning design from Kineo with expertise in management development from The Oxford Group and aimed at employers. It is a new, blended learning approach to develop front-line managers, by addressing specific skills gaps to make sure they have the right skills for the job. Facilitated sessions are reinforced with elearning, including an integrated set of assessments, training, practice exercises, reflections and management reports – all in one portal.

Over £750,000 was allocated to seven projects including:

• St Giles Trust, one of the leading charities focused on rehabilitation and the prevention of offending, was awarded £100,000 over a period of 3 years to support the development of its peer mentoring ex-offender employability programme in Leeds, London and Ipswich.
• AfriKids, set up in 2002 with a mission to protect and promote children’s rights in one of the most deprived areas of Ghana, was awarded £63,225 to provide training loans and mentoring support for 20 young women in teaching and nursing; helping not only the individuals but also the community to fill vital skills gaps in the region. The project aims to be self-sustaining as the loans are repaid from future earnings.
• The Change Foundation, a UK-based youth charity that uses sport and dance to change the lives of disadvantaged people who are at risk from social exclusion, was awarded £147,329 over three years to support the Special Team Of Role Models (STORM) project, a mentoring programme that supports young women leaving care to make positive transitions into education, work or training.
• Global Generation, a London-based charity aiming to grow ecological understanding and entrepreneurialism as a foundation for creating a positive future, was awarded £160,059 over a period of three years, to support its Living Culture programme. This programme takes an innovative and holistic approach to the economic development of young people, which focusses both on the individual’s personal development and their vocational skills development.
• The Manipal Foundation was awarded £97,470 over a period of three years, to support ‘The Virtual Classroom’ project. This flagship programme commenced in 2014 to provide rural children in India with access to high-quality urban teachers through a ‘virtual school’ – helping them pass the level 10 exams, which are the basic qualification for a government job.
• Near East Foundation UK was awarded £119,994 over a period of two years, to develop an employability and enterprise curriculum and establish a network of Master Trainers within local Siraj Centres in Jordan. The master trainers are aiming to train 6,000 vulnerable refugees and vulnerable Jordanians to enable them to move towards employment or to establish their own microenterprise.
• An Cosán was awarded £91,068 over a period of two years, to support women aged 30-36 in rural Ireland to complete a City & Guilds accredited programme, delivered through their innovative Virtual Community College. 

We increased the amount awarded in bursaries in the UK by 25% to £250,000 to provide training and qualifications to 93 people who otherwise would not have been able to access them. We estimate that to date we have awarded over £2 million and supported over 1000 people since the programme began in 1999.  We also committed to fund a three year scholarship programme, donating £25,000 per year (co-funded with the Manipal Foundation to provide £50,000) to award scholarships to 300 young Indians.

We were proud to support the following two initiatives in London to help our local community around our head office:

• The creation of a Quality Mark scheme by London Youth. Developed with and accredited by the City & Guilds business, it is the only quality assurance scheme for youth organisations that involves young people in the assessment. It provides youth organisations with a badge of excellence that they can show to local authorities, funders and young people to prove they are doing the most they can to transform lives. So far 90 youth centres have received the quality mark across 25 London boroughs.
• The House of St Barnabas’ Employment Programme aims to break the cycle of homelessness by providing training, work experience and employment opportunities to help people rebuild their lives through a 12-week Employment Academy. This programme helped 17 people get back into employment.

In addition to investing in our communities, we are also working to lessen the impact we have on the environment in the areas where we operate. We are committed to energy efficiency in our offices to minimise our impact on the environment, and our suppliers need to abide by a strict code of conduct including offering a sustainable wage to contractors and not allowing modern slavery in any part of the supply chain. A Sustainable Procurement Working Group was set up to develop guidance on best practices when choosing suppliers across the Group, to make sure social enterprises, SMEs, minority-owned and eco-friendly businesses are considered in addition to large, established suppliers.

Our annual Awards Programme is comprised of a wide range of honours, which reward and recognise individuals and organisations that have demonstrated exceptional achievement through training and skills development. 

Fellowship is the highest of our Professional Recognition Awards.  We awarded Fellowship to 20 exceptional people who have demonstrated excellence and can be considered role models for their profession. These Awards carry internationally-recognised post-nominal letters.

The Princess Royal Training Awards was created to highlight the positive impact that training and skills development can have on business performance. In this inaugural year we expected to receive 60 applications. We exceeded this number, with 110 submissions ranging from multinational businesses and SMEs to the public sector and education spread across the UK. We also received 250 registrations of interest in the awards since they launched. The Princess Royal Training Awards Commission, which is comprised of Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal and 10 senior leaders from the business and learning and development community, made awards to 34 UK businesses of all sizes and sectors who achieved the new standard. The successful organisations all demonstrated that training can make a significant impact on business success. They were announced in August 2016 and received their award at a ceremony at St James’ Palace in November 2016.

The Prince Philip Medal, which was created by our previous President His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh, champions the link between training and career success. It honours one exceptional individual each year who has ‘travelled the City & Guilds [of London Institute] path’ throughout his or her life. The Prince Philip Medal was awarded to Gary Richmond, a Chef Tutor at the River Cottage Chefs’ School.

Our heritage makes us uniquely positioned to understand the future of work and learning. We have always worked closely with industry and adapted to changing technical, social and economic trends to anticipate and fill skills gaps. We continued to work with key partners and commissioned research in this area.

Futureproof

We partnered with Business in the Community (BITC) this year to create a new campaign and framework to help businesses break down the barriers young people face in their recruitment processes.

Skills Debate 2016: The future world of work

In June 2016 we brought together leading business figures to share their insights into what skills the future world of work will require, and the impact this will have on productivity and the international flow of skilled labour, aiming to gain ideas towards a new economic model for skills. The debate spanned a range of topics, including the rise of automation and artificial intelligence, the changing nature of work, and shifts to global demographics. The panel concluded that, for businesses to succeed in the new world, they need to leverage the opportunities that technology brings without forgetting that ‘people buy from people.’ That means supporting their employees in developing skills in leadership and management so they are prepared for the future.

Research

We conducted several pieces of in-depth research in order to inform and influence the conversation around global skills development. They included Skills Confidence 2016, The Economic Benefits of Vocational Education and Training (VET) in the UK and Making Apprenticeships Work.

Our Skills Confidence 2016 was an international study of 8,000 employees in the UK, USA, South Africa and India. This study – the first we have carried out – measured people’s confidence in their skills for the workplace of today, in five years’ time and in the next decade. Our key findings were:

• Almost all respondents (95%) are confident in their own skills and productivity.
• Only half (52%) of respondents feel over-qualified for the job they currently do, whilst over a quarter (29%) think that their skills are under-utilised in their current roles.
• 16% of UK respondents and 11% of US respondents are not that confident that their jobs will exist in the next 5 years
• 80% of Indian respondents are confident they have the skills to work abroad, but 40% worry about ‘brain drain’
• 46% of all respondents lack confidence in their countries’ education systems to prepare young people for the world of work.

Our research into the global economic benefits of investment in Vocational Education and Training (VET) explored systems in four countries – the UK, USA, India and South Africa – to understand the potential economic benefits of investing in skills.  Key findings were:

• Boosting skills by 10% could increase UK GDP by £163bn.
• A 10% increase in the number of upper secondary school pupils enrolled in vocational education could lead to a 1.5% reduction in youth unemployment in the US and the UK.
• UK businesses see average annual productivity gains of over £10,000 per hired apprentice.
• Only 2.3% of India’s workforce has undertaken formal skills training.
• US apprentices earn $60,000 more than their counterparts in the nine years after enrolment. But less than 1% of 15-24 year olds are involved in an apprenticeship scheme.

Making Apprenticeships Work is a report that was developed with our Industry Skills Board to help make sure education meets the needs of employers. The research sets out a 25-point action plan focusing on how to deliver quality apprenticeships in the UK, including calls to increase the proportion of apprenticeships offered as vacancies, and recommendations for an employer-led governing body for apprenticeships, sitting separately from Government. Due to this research, our recommendation for an employer-led governing body has been taken on board and letters to editors featured in The Times and Daily Telegraph among a number of articles of coverage across national, regional and trade media.