The Challenge

St Helens College currently offers a range of services to local businesses, including:

• SkillsNorthwest: Training solutions designed to meet skills gaps
• Skillworks: Funding towards training and development
• Conference Facility

The College is currently designing a strategy which will pull together the different services offered to businesses.

The overall objective was to establish how businesses in the St Helens borough currently perceive St Helens College, incorporating the following sub-objectives:

• To ascertain generally how the College is perceived by local small to medium sized businesses (SME’s)
• To establish the extent to which SME’s associate the College with services to businesses and their awareness of the different services offered
• To gauge perceptions of the College in relation to services to businesses
• To identify what local businesses expect from a supplier of business to business solutions and specifically what they would expect from St Helens College – how is good service defined?
  To establish how businesses view training in general e.g. is it a priority to invest in training?

The Approach

DJS Research conducted 150 telephone interviews with users and non-users of the college

Users were recruited from lists provided by St Helens College, Non Users were free found.

The interview was with the person responsible for training within their organisation and lasted around 10 minutes

The Results

Recommendations from the research centred around:

• More outward communication to promote the college's offer
• Specific sector marketing
• Promotion of the teaching staff's experience and of less traditional services e.g. funding, broker and consultancy
• With a relatively high proportion of users satisfied, there is obviously scope to use testimonials to promote the College’s service or the results from this survey.

Testimonial

Marketing, St Helens College