Apprenticeship Case Study: Always Consult

Always Consult are an established and proven management and people development training provider. They are experts in Clinical Leadership training. They were founded in 2009 and now provide training and qualifications in Leadership and Management, Coaching and Mentoring and Careers information and Guidance to a diverse range of organisations both nationally and internationally.

Their mission is to deliver high quality, innovative and bespoke apprenticeship training to enhance skills, knowledge and behaviours in learners’ existing roles, providing a springboard for the future and ensuring employers have a highly trained and engaged workforce.

The challenge

Always Consult were using a training management platform that they felt was overly complicated, that wasn’t working properly and was causing friction within their business.

In order to support them in achieving their ambition of being the leading provider of training in clinical leadership, Always Consult wanted a robust training management platform, that was a single joined-up system. The solution had to be intuitive to use and help drive compliance, to reduce risk to their business and administrative workload for trainers.

The solution

Bud was first introduced to Always Consult by Roddy Christie, Director of Apprenticeships. Roddy had joined Always Consult in 2017 to set up their apprenticeship training from scratch, and at that time he introduced a management platform that he believed would be a single, end-to-end solution. Roddy said “To be fair, our existing platform was fine for a year or so when we had small numbers of learners. But as we grew and used the system more and more, I realised it just didn’t come up to the right level”.

Roddy knew that in order for the business to achieve its ambitions for apprenticeships it would need a single joined-up system, that would allow for growth and enable apprenticeship delivery at scale.

Roddy wanted a system that was simple for trainers and learners to use and that would give management the accurate reporting they needed. He already knew that Bud was that system but it was extremely important to him that his colleagues were well informed and were part of the decision-making process.

With a considerable proportion of their apprenticeships being a Foundational Leadership and Management programme for Junior Doctors, Roddy was paired with Bud’s Business Development Manager, Ruth Johnson. Prior to joining Bud, Ruth had pursued a career as a Nurse and worked as an Apprenticeship Trainer and Area Manager. This meant she was able to draw on her unique insight and understanding of the issues the Always Consult team were experiencing and to support them throughout the sales process.

During their initial demos, the team at Always Consult were wowed by the fact that at enrolment Bud automatically generates the Individual Learner Record in real time. Bud also automatically updates the ILR throughout the learning journey meaning evidence always matches the ESFA funding claim. Having previously manually updated the ILR, this would be a real game changer for the Always Consult team.

On platform

Christie said “The team at Always Consult really like Bud. It’s easy and simple to use. You really can’t break it, the team feel happy and confident enough to just get on with it which means we can spend less time training them on how to use the platform compared to other systems.”

Christie was also keen to praise the Bud onboarding and Customer Success teams “Paul, Rupert, Brad and Emily have all been great, they’ve got Always Consult onto Bud in the best way possible.”

When asked ‘what next?’, Christie was really looking forward to using rich SCORM content in Bud. With a reduced administrative workload the team can now focus on the training, using SCORM to best effect. Providing flexible, interactive learning content, knowing that time spent, completion status, pass/fail status and score are all tracked by Bud.

Bud’s Director of Customer Success, Brad Tombling, said:

“We’re so pleased to be working with Always Consult, they really are embracing the platform and improving their processes as part of the adoption of Bud. It’s fantastic that we can help support the training of Junior Doctors who we all know are incredibly stretched, making their learning more accessible and their journey a little bit easier”.

The most complete training management platform

Does your training business want to reduce admin overheads, improve success rates and bring all your training and funding data into a single source of truth with full one-click visibility of trainer caseload, learner progress and funding claims?

Bud takes the back-end resource cost from your team so they can focus on what they are best at, and managers can have the information they need at their fingertips to make decisions to keep moving your training business forward.

Contact us for a quick chat to discuss options. If you feel ready to take the next step, then book a zero-obligation, bespoke demonstration of Bud’s Training Management software for you and your team and see how you can directly benefit from using the platform.