Under-fire utility firm Southern Water is to send all 1,600 employees on a three-day, off-site training course to improve its ailing customer service. The firm was fined £20m this week for lying about its customer service performance to regulator   More...
16 November 2007 14:18

The spectre of mandatory training of all staff is looming larger after the organisation behind the Train to Gain scheme admitted it would miss its Level 2 targets by as much as two years. The free skills brokerage service is crucial to the government  More...
30 October 2007 08:00

Skills minister David Lammy has blamed employer apathy for the government's failure to boost women's skill levels. He said the biggest problem was getting companies to offer apprenticeships to women or pay even a small proportion of training cost  More...
16 October 2007 08:00

Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has launched a £227,000 Opportunity Fund project called Skills for Food. The scheme will provide catering and hospitality courses in west London to meet the increasing demand for staff in the run-up to the 2012   More...
24 July 2007 12:30

Employers must learn to appreciate the experience and expertise older people can bring to the workforce if they are to address the looming skills shortage, academics have warned. The  third annual HSBC Future of Retirement study has found that early  More...
25 May 2007 12:04

Skills envoy Sir Digby Jones has warned UK businesses that unless they rise to the challenge of the new global economy, countries such as China and India will ‘eclipse’ the established Western economies within a matter of years. Speaking at the   More...
17 May 2007 08:12

News that not a single employer has, so far, signed up to the skills pledge, as recommended by the Leitch Review last December , suggests the government faces an uphill battle in persuading businesses to commit themselves to such an undertaking.   More...
15 May 2007 08:00

A City university, along with a consortium of charities, will launch a new academy for parenting practitioners in October, following a £30m grant announcement by children’s minister Beverley Hughes. The National Academy for Parenting Practitio  More...
27 April 2007 15:47

Two leaders tell how attending a leadership course improved their confidence. Managing director Peter Black of Digital Steps Black founded his business in May 2000 and attended a strategic leadership training course at Roffey Park in 2005.   More...
24 April 2007 00:00

British companies should have the power to award their own nationally recognised qualifications to employees, according to the CBI . The employers' organisation believes that employees are being wrongly labelled as 'low-skilled' because the nati  More...
23 April 2007 15:39

Time is running out for British businesses to tackle the burgeoning skills famine threatening to blight the economy, UK skills envoy Sir Digby Jones has warned. Speaking at the British Chamber of Commerce annual conference earlier   More...
20 April 2007 15:50

The North West’s aerospace industry has received £1.6m to improve skills and training across the region. The latest cash boost to the North West Aerospace Alliance follows an earlier tranche of £2.6m from the North West Development Agency in   More...
18 April 2007 11:30

Unions have called for improved training and advice for staff in the oil industry following the publication of the fifth report by the Buncefield Major Incident Investigation Board . The report challenged the industry to strengthen safety standards a  More...
16 April 2007 15:30

Employers have been told by the government that they need to do more to stamp out poor spelling and grammar at work. The Department for Education and Skills published a survey that showed four in 10 employers policed flirting and gum chewing m  More...
22 March 2007 11:30

The government will this month publish plans to raise the compulsory education age to 18. Secretary of state for education and skills Alan Johnson revealed the plans yesterday in a speech to the Sector Skills Development Agency (S  More...
07 March 2007 14:07

The police service needs to train 6,000 more officers to cope with chemical, biological, radioactive or nuclear (CBRN) attacks, according to the Police Federation . The service currently has 7,000 officers trained to deal with CBRN situations. T  More...
16 January 2007 12:10

Business leaders in the West Midlands have been urged to increase the finance skills of their employees to boost economic growth in the areas. Vernon Everitt, director of retail themes at the Financial Services Authority, told business heads that th  More...
15 September 2006 13:00

In the past nine months the Learning and Skills Council has been dogged by criticism for failing to engage employers and failing to affect levels of employer delivered training  More...
11 April 2006 09:30

Do diversity training programmes offer real business benefits or are they just a box-ticking exercise? Alex Blyth investigates  More...
17 January 2006 00:00

This is the sort of text that will have you smiling behind the jacket  More...
10 January 2006 00:00