As a company, we have found that offering an accredited training programme (ATP) to all new staff has made us attractive to an extremely diverse range of potential employees—in fact, it has become a unique selling point for us as an employer.

Venners is the largest provider of stock-taking services in the UK hospitality industry. For over 125 years, we have served pubs, restaurants and hotels by providing field-based teams to produce vital stock results for our clients together with advice and support on how those results can be improved.

Effective stocktaking is crucial for a hospitality business. Ultimately it protects gross profit – that all-important bottom line.  As a company, we provide our clients with key, up-to-date data on how those margins are performing and how they can make gains. Failure to keep an eye on gross profit will ultimately mean a decline in profit. In a time of rising costs – rent, business rates, staff wages – it has never been more important.

So, we need to be certain that whoever we send out to do the stock take for a client has the requisite skills and knowledge to give first-class service and top-notch advice.

The training programme we offer our new starters is accredited by the Skills and Education Group owned, BIIAB – and we believe it provides significant benefits in three different ways.

An accredited training programme is a very standardised way of training that ensures all trainees receive a level of training that will enable them to achieve an agreed standard. We are predominantly data-led, so that really is a key benefit to us. The programme has very standardised assessments, key objectives, and key milestone markers so we can see people are progressing. This is of huge benefit to our clients.

The offer of an ATP also proves to our new staff that we are investing in them by offering a robust training and development package. It shows them we care about their success and value their career progression.

Finally, for us as a business, we’ve found the accreditation process ensures we are looking at all the right things concerning our team. When we first were accredited 3.5 years ago, we did hit some bumps in the road, and it wasn’t without pain! It was nerve-wracking, but I think what it does for us now, as we go through re-accreditation year on year, is it makes us look at what we’re doing and ask ourselves if we can do it better. So it also acts as a really good review point for us.

On a day-to-day basis, as BIIAB’s parent company, Skills and Education Group are really, really helpful. We’ve learnt where we’ve had gaps in our policies that we needed to address and now our yearly accreditation is a lot less stressful – there is an understanding because we worked through that initial process together. If you are thinking about working with Skills and Education Group to gain accreditation, don’t be scared! You will be assigned a Relationship Manager who is there to help throughout the whole process. Believe me, I’ve asked plenty of silly questions along the way, but they’ve always come back to me with a really honest answer and offered support and help wherever I’ve needed it.

There is no doubt that our accreditation enhances our reputation. We believe we are the best at what we do, and we want to associate ourselves with the accepted standard in the industry – and that is certainly what BIIAB is.