Well, it has been another strange and difficult year. Personally, I have complete admiration for the human spirit that is consistently able to turn calamity and difficulty into positive energy to continue and meet the challenges life presents. Resilience has been a theme for so many of us in 2021. Spending extended periods of time in our homes, often away from family and friends and being fearful of venturing outside or visiting our loved ones. We have all needed to dig deep at times and find the strength to continue through each day.
Business has also been challenging for all types of sectors and trades. Aim Higher Training has not been immune from the changes that the pandemic has brought to all our lives. We have, however, decided to use this year as a chance to reset, regroup and re-focus on our strengths and convert any threats into opportunities. Consequently, we have made some changes within the business and have exciting plans for 2022.
So as we look back to 2021, we would like to celebrate our successes and extend our gratitude to our learners, partners, clients, colleagues, and supporters.
Reviewing our Training Offer
At the start of our reset journey, we started to celebrate our strengths. We spent some time thinking about the focus of the training company and decided that our mission is to help people to live their best lives by finding great work-life balance and finding careers and work they love.
As such we have produced some new courses on personal growth, promote courses on mental health and stress awareness, encourage well-being and help to guide anyone on a journey to find their perfect career and life balance.
As boring as it may seem, this process also meant that we started by reviewing our policies and procedures and ensuring that our approach towards quality was as robust as ever. And in my role as Centre Coordinator, I spent valuable time reviewing our training and qualifications offer, re-writing some of our course materials, and creating new workbooks to support our online delivery approach.
New Aim Higher Training Website
On the back of this project, it felt like the right time to revamp the Aim Higher Training website. This was an in-depth process as we decided to completely review our offers, re-write the text on our site, and create more user-friendly information for our customers. We were incredibly lucky to work with two great women on this project. Jules White at the Last Hurdle who designed the site and led the project. Her consummate professionalism and creativity were just brilliant while we worked on our new website. Massive thanks also go to Issy Comley for her creative input and ideas, her great copywriting skills, and for keeping us all on track.
New Online Courses
As part of this project, we were super excited to launch our new personal development courses on the Aim Higher Teachable Academy. We have produced a series of free Spotlight courses geared towards anyone who may feel that their life isn’t quite on track and wants to try to find some new direction.
These are short courses designed to help shift perspective and start to think about our lives and plan for a new direction. We are pleased that these courses have already been useful for our learners as part of their own personal development paths.
Big thanks to one of our new partners Nadezhda Mihaylova , co-founder at Coaching Wheels, who supported us to create the life and work wheels for one of our courses
Please check out Spotlight on Work-Life Balance, Spotlight on Personal Development and Spotlight on Making a Plan and let us know what you think?
New Training Projects
We are excited to be working with lots of new learners who are aiming to change their careers or gain promotion and see qualifications as an invaluable way to improve their CV’s. By working with individuals on a one-to-one basis we are able to start mapping out personal development plans that can start to focus on creating work-life balance and provide real focus on career goals and progression paths.
We have embraced a new projects with some new clients, including the new End Point Assessment Organisation, the Lift Escalator Industry Association LEIA. We have collaborated with them to design a programme to train and develop their new team of end point assessors and internal quality assurers. It’s been a real pleasure to work with Karen Slade and the team of professionals she has assembled to support End Pont Assessment at LEIA and we’re looking forward to completing this project by late spring 2022.
New Initiatives
After following the debates and reading the outcomes from COP26 in November 2021, we are all more aware of the impact of climate change on our planet. At Aim Higher Training as part of our commitment towards trying to take some baby steps towards climate change we have taken decisions to change some of the things we do. Consequently, we have committed to making our offices and approach to delivery as Zero Waste as possible. We are excited to enter a new partnership with the International Tree Foundation and will be funding the planting of a new tree for every qualification we register a student for within our NCFE centre.
Thank you’s
Our thanks go to NCFE, our awarding body for their continued support and flexibility with the choice of courses and for supporting the management of our accredited centre. Extra big thanks go to our Account Advisor Daryl Rose for his cheerful professionalism.
I would like to extend a personal thank you to our talented team of Associates who provide first-class support and input into all areas of our delivery. Big thanks also to our advisor author and publisher Hillary Read, who provides great wisdom and guidance when we need it.
We are grateful for everything we have achieved in 2021 and are excited about the year ahead. With new courses coming down the pipeline, new partnerships to announce, and lots of new ideas and projects coming on board. We hope that Aim Higher Training can offer you the guidance and support you may need with your personal development and career plans in 2022.
Many thanks from everyone at Aim Higher Training for reading our review of 2021 and we wish you an incredibly happy and successful New Year.
Written by Jane Hyde-Walsh Director and Centre Co-ordinator at Aim Higher Training and Development 28th December 2021