This is a fairly complex area and one where the schemes available vary over time. At the time of writing there appear to be a number of ways of accessing funds from the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) – mainly through their ‘Train to Gain’ initiative. The following details pertain to England only.

The most relevant seems to be through the ‘Leadership and Management’ programme. You access this via local contacts in your area. Click here for the list of regional contacts. The contacts on that list are Project Managers who will arrange for a ‘broker’ to contact you to discuss your training needs generally and help you to navigate the funding issues.

Leadership and Management (L&M) funding is available to businesses employing between 5 and 250 people and involves a £500 grant with a further £500 available provided it is matched £ for £.

From an Institute of Promotional Marketing Training point of view this is most likely to be appropriate to fund our one day courses, all of which are now £495 and are appropriate for managers and above and thus fall within the remit of the L&M funding.

There are other sources of Train to Gain money available for NVQ type vocational training, which may or may not be of relevance to your company. Whilst Institute of Promotional Marketing Qualifications have been designed to have an NVQ equivalency, we do not operate them on a scale that is worth while having them evaluated and accredited by a government approved Awarding Body (this is both very expensive and very time consuming). So the Certificates and Diplomas will not be approved for funding through the main Train to Gain programme and the typical candidates of those courses would not be eligible for L&M funding as they are tend not to be senior enough in the organisation.

I hope that makes sense – if you gain funding for any of our courses I would really appreciate a call to let me know how it worked, so that I can feed your experiences back to other members.

Chris Bestley, 01372 459354, chrisb@theipm.org.uk

In March 2010 I embarked on the IPM Diploma in Promotional & Interactive Marketing. I had been eager to gain this definitive industry qualification for some years but time and budget constraints had always intervened. Having cleared enough space at last to tackle the Diploma I then discovered that grants were available from the Learning Skills Council (LSC) in my region. Through their ‘Train to Gain initiative I found that a £500 grant was available to support this kind of relevant bespoke training to businesses between 5 and 250 members in size. And a further £500 if matched £ for £. A simple call to the local contact sourced via their Leadership and Management program led to an arranged visit from one of their Project Managers. A very informal meeting ensued and funding was approved there and then.

If you haven’t accessed this grant previously and want to undertake industry training courses then I strongly recommend you apply. You may be eligible for support but act now as funding is currently only available until December 2010.

Graeme Smith, Managing Director, Cyan Group Ltd