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.
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.