Apprenticeship Case Study: Paragon Skills

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Paragon Skills is a top 10 national training provider with a diverse offering of apprenticeships. They create long-lasting apprenticeship partnerships that centre around the client’s personal needs, aims, culture, vision and values.

The company has been operating for over 20 years and supports nearly 1,500 organisations and 4,000 learners. Their teams are passionate about lifelong learning and committed to providing an outstanding experience for learners and employers alike.

The challenge

Paragon Skills wanted to change their operational approach to apprenticeship programme creation and management. Before onboarding Bud, their operational strategy was outdated, which was impacting the efficiency and accuracy of their processes – and enrolment in particular – while restricting data visibility across applications.

Ian Bamford, COO of Paragon Skills, explains that the company wanted an updated solution to streamline their day-to-day operations:

“For Paragon Skills to continue providing excellent apprenticeship opportunities, we needed to implement a software system that would support a data-led and user-centric way of working. Overall, we were looking for a solution that would boost our efficiency and strategy towards apprenticeship management.”

Their current infrastructure needed to be replaced with a SaaS system that would enable greater consistency, standard regulation and outstanding delivery. Bud’s Apprenticeship Management System ticked all the boxes, and Paragon Skills became one of the earliest adopters of their software solution.

The solution

Bud Systems implemented a more intuitive, end-to-end system that helped Paragon Skills manage their apprenticeships more efficiently.

After extensive research into Paragon Skills’ internal processes and external market, Bud was able to design a software solution that met their operational ambitions.

To enable a data-driven infrastructure, Bud implemented an all-in-one platform to manage learners and employers.

Ian describes his daily use of Bud’s training management platform:

“Bud’s integrated solution makes monitoring progress and data simple,”

“Actionable insights are now easily accessible allowing proactive strategies to be at the forefront of our everyday operations.”

The Programme Design Suite also empowered Paragon Skills to take control of their apprenticeship design in an intuitive way. As an integrated part of the software, this tool helped the business to easily create consistent programmes and improve delivery performance.

Paragon Skills now has an operational strategy that enables interactivity and complete visibility.

Ian discusses the user experience of Bud.

“Bud is a really intuitive system. It’s easy to navigate and so flexible that we can access it on the move using PCs, tablets and phones. This makes maintaining core standards, ensuring accuracy, and optimising efficiency easier than ever.”

With the continued help and support of the Bud team, Paragon Skills has fully migrated all their operational systems and learners onto the new platform. Not only have they optimised the efficiency of administration and delivery, but the user experience for the learner has also improved.

Ian states:

“We love the self-service forms which mean our learners can complete their details in their own time, saving our Personal Tutors time and allowing them to focus on delivering quality learning”

“We have seen an impressive increase in our success rates since implementing Bud with numbers rising from 66.7% to 71.4% in a single year.”

The result

Bud software supports Paragon Skills in the creation of effective, efficient strategy and the delivery of excellent apprenticeship experiences. Their relationship remains strong, with continual guidance from the Bud team and a close internal connection. Heather Frankham, Bud Co-Founder, also holds a position as Non-Executive Chair in Paragon Skills.

Ian concludes:

“Bud goes beyond simply enabling delivery by ensuring the smooth, long-term implementation of their solution. They are a passionate team and by partnering together we have driven best practice across our business,”

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.

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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.