It has been a whilst since our last update so I wanted to share with some news on what has been happening at Lighthouse.  In June this year we celebrate 10 years which is humbling – we have gone through so much since we started in 2012 and I couldn’t be prouder of what we have achieved…thank you so much to everyone who has played their part in this!  We will be looking to do something to celebrate this amazing milestone later in the year!

Staff Changes

With great sadness we waved off Helen Peck our Operations Manager last week. Helen will leave a massive gap both practically and personally but we all wish her well for the next step in her career. We will not be replacing Helen directly for the time being – her work will be split between Sarah Hitchcock, who has been promoted to Admin Team Leader, Angie Heaney, our Business Development Manager and Sharon Ball, our Programme Manager.

The admin team are growing with Kerry Ball joining us earlier in the year and Caroline Byrne joining us later this month. We are also on the lookout for our next Business Admin apprentice to join the team. From a sales and marketing perspective we are delighted to welcome Lewis Webb to the team as our Digital Marketer.

Harriet Blake, our longstanding Head of Programmes, has stepped over to focus on some specific projects for the remainder of this year, so will be less involved on a day to day basis but still very much heading up our apprenticeship team. During this time Charlie Hill, one of our directors, will be supporting Harriet with some of the day to day management tasks.

Back to the Office

The team are delighted to be back in the office after many many months of home working. To keep the work life balance there we have recently introduced ‘Flexible Friday’ where people can choose to work from home regularly along with adopting a hybrid approach for some tasks. We are finally able to enjoy our lovely new expanded office which we moved to late last year and might even be close to planning our postponed Christmas party! We are finding clients are tentatively moving back to some face-to-face delivery which is lovely – we still continue to deliver many programmes remotely and are, in fact, looking to move to a fully blended approach later this year. It has been fantastic to get back in the classroom after so long!

Apprenticeships

We continue to grow our apprenticeship offering – we have recently added:

• Business Admin (Level 3)
• Coaching Professional (Level 5)

with plans to launch:

• Learning Mentor (Level 3),
• Improvement Practitioner (Level 4)
• Senior Leader (Level 7) apprenticeships later this year.

Most of our programmes are now also available on an open basis with no minimum numbers so this has opened the door to many more organisations. Our ongoing success with our Team Leader and Operations/Department Manager programmes continue with over 98% achieving a merit or distinction at End Point Assessment. Our strategic partnership with the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) enables us to add Chartered Manager status automatically for those completing their programmes with us. We are in the process of currently embedding a new Learner Management System including a Virtual Learning Platform to support our delegates, which we are really excited about – you will hear more about this in coming weeks and months…

Other training

We are seeing a resurgence in non-apprenticeship training with many organisations re-establishing management development programmes in the post COVID world. We are also seeing lots of new challenges arising in this world which we are delighted to support organisations with. We are able to offer our apprenticeship programmes on a commercial basis for those who do not wish to go down the apprenticeship route – we are seeing a fair bit of uptake with this and can still offer a professional qualification.