After a successful first year of the Help to Grow: Management training programme, registrations are now open for Year Two at UWE Bristol.
Help to Grow: Management is a 12-week practical training programme for senior managers of small and medium enterprises that aims to help boost performance, resilience, and long-term growth of their businesses. Delivered through a blend of online and face-to-face learning, the course covers strategies for growth and innovation, leading high-performance teams, and digital adoption, as well as financial management and responsible business practices.
Learners engage in regular peer group calls, have access to 10 hours of one-to-one mentor support, hear from guest speakers and have access to join other SME leaders through both local and national alumni networks.
By the end of the programme, participants will develop a tailored business growth plan to help increase productivity and revenue and thus take their business to the next level.
Help to Grow: Management is 90% subsidised by the government and costs just £750. Designed to be undertaken alongside full-time work, the twelve modules require 50 hours of commitment to timetabled activities.
In our first year, UWE Bristol has guided over one hundred SME leaders through the programme, building on the university’s proven track record of supporting SMEs across the South-West. UWE Bristol has held the Small Business Charter since 2015 indicating a strong track record in working with, supporting and developing businesses. Those completing the programme have benefitted from the expertise of UWE module facilitators – Senior Lecturers at Bristol Business School who combine academic and real-life business experience. Additionally, learners have been supported throughout the course by a dedicated project support team enabling the smooth running of the programme and excellent pastoral care.
UWE Bristol Help to Grow: Management Alumni, Robert Ogden of Renewable Exchange commented:
“The programme gives you a very broad coverage of a lot of relevant business topics. For me personally, the mentoring sessions were a great way to take the entire course material, distil down what I found most relevant to Renewable Exchange and then turn these into actionable changes. Some of these changes can be fairly significant, for example, we’ve now opened an office in Germany which is our first international market. But, quite a lot of the changes that you might look to make are fairly small and quick improvements and just those marginable gains that improves the way the business functions and considers problems, and I found these to be really helpful for Renewable Exchange.
If you’re looking for ways to grow your business, and if you go in with the right open-minded attitude and can commit the necessary time to learning and taking action off the back of it, then you’ve got a really great chance of getting some success out of your investment into the programme, so I would definitely recommend it.”
UWE Bristol Programme Director, Dan Knox commented:
“We at Bristol Business School are rightly proud of our long-standing commitment to regional businesses and communities, and especially pleased to have supported so many businesses on the Help to Grow: Management programme. The depth and breadth of support that this programme offers is unrivalled nationally and really gives SME leaders the time, the space and the tools to step back from day-to-day operations in order to think strategically. We look forward to welcoming many more businesses to the programme in 2022-23 and to continuing to support our alumni to find the most appropriate ways for them to continue to grow and to engage with further opportunities in the regional and national business development ecosystem.”
UWE Bristol are running courses across the South West, including Bristol, Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire and Cornwall through the academic year 2022-23.
Find out more about courses available and book your place on our website or contact the team on helptogrow@uwe.ac.uk.