Helping business leaders to grow
NTU’s Å·ÃÀ¾ÞÈé Business School (NBS) has a rich variety of programmes available to businesses and professionals in the Mansfield and Ashfield area. The Help To Grow management course is part of the School’s offering: a development opportunity aimed at senior leaders and owners of small and medium sized businesses.
Previous leaders on the programme have come from a range of backgrounds and sectors, each seeking to develop and grow their organisation.
One such example is Robert Gavin, Sales Director at Aluminium Bending Specialists (ABS) in Kirkby-in-Ashfield.
ABS employs 28 people and supplies a wide range of industries and businesses including construction, architectural, commercial vehicles, exhibition manufacturers, aluminium window fabricators and office furniture manufacturers. They even supplied products for the Athletes’ Village at the 2012 London Olympics.
Stand-out course
Robert researched the Help to Grow management course at NBS after initially being attracted by the 90% course fee reduction provided by the government. Having completed an MBA prior to his 15-year career as Sales Director of ABS, he perceived the content as a “mini-MBA" that would act as a complete refresher and bring his knowledge up to date. Robert previously worked with NBS as part of a Postgraduate Consultancy Project, so the school stood out to him and its proximity to his business made it easy to schedule the course around his workload.
“The course requires little effort to attend and does not include coursework making it the ideal way to learn while still completing your daily workload,” Robert says. “It included everything I needed to update my knowledge with the latest thinking and interact with my peers for advice at a price I couldn’t turn down.”
Robert has since put that updated knowledge to use at ABS. The course provided him with the insight he needed to transition from an access-based management system to a cloud-based system, with the help of a Å·ÃÀ¾ÞÈé-based software company. Communication speeds have increased as a result, and in the future, Robert hopes to develop the system so that customers can track their own orders. Furthermore, since participating in the Help to Grow management course, Robert has since signed up as a volunteer mentor on the programme, and has mentored three businesses.
Help to Grow Management is a course for SME Leaders that is 90% funded by the UK Government and available across the UK at over 60 business schools.