Local employer improves sector career opportunities in Huntingdonshire
CIMSPA Employer Partner One Leisure has restructured to improve career opportunities as well as training and development for the sector workforce
As with many local leisure provisions, Huntingdonshire District Council employs established inhouse service provider One Leisure to run its leisure facilities in the region. Although this is a long-standing system across the UK, in Huntingdonshire’s case, it needed a rethink.
As a traditional leisure service provider, One Leisure was treading water – they continued to run their business how it had always been done, but since the pandemic brought about an evolution in both employee and customer needs, this had been decreasing rapidly in its effectiveness.
With the council’s new workforce strategy as an impetus and foundation for improvement, the organisation wanted to change and become more viable as a business. To start the process off in a practical direction, they undertook a staff review.
You might assume that this is code for mass redundancies – which is what a lot of companies do in an attempt to improve their financial situation. As a member of its local skills accountability board, however, One Leisure wanted to take a different, more sustainable approach.
Workforce focus
The core principles of the One Leisure staff review were centred around council, customer and – most interestingly – staff outcomes. The review concentrated on the provider becoming more customer focussed, providing better quality staffing structures, improving value for money for the council and its residents as well as underpinning the organisation’s control and compliance towards their statutory obligations.
They started with staff engagement sessions – why not use their biggest resource, a group of sector professionals with a vested interest in the success of their employer, to explore how to improve?
“We undertook a number of staff engagement sessions so that we could understand what the staff wanted from any proposed changes. We didn’t set out with a monetary value; this wasn’t driven around efficiency,” explains Gregg Holland, Head of Leisure Services at Huntingdonshire District Council.
In these sessions, staff identified a range of key priorities:
- Better career progression
- Better training and development opportunities
- Structures that respond to the staff engagement sessions and feedback
- Staff succession
- Careers as opposed to jobs
Local skills
Provision of this type of local career development opportunity for the sector workforce is a major target in our local skills work. With local skills advisory boards bringing together sector stakeholders from education, businesses, healthcare and employability-focused organisations, regions are able to work collaboratively to provide appropriate training and career opportunities for their sport and physical activity workforce.
As members of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Local Skills Accountability Board, One Leisure and Huntingdonshire District Council were able to benefit from the group’s collective insight to spark ideas from the staff review and an innovative way to boost the business:
“We started the journey with Rich Kerr, our local skills hub manager, and the local skills accountability board. I realised that our journey to improving our career progression and staff succession was a great opportunity to align ourselves and our new structures with CIMSPA and the professional standards.
By doing so, not only could we give our staff better career opportunities internally, but they could gain qualifications and extended training through CIMSPA’s resources, partners and guidance,” says Gregg.
CIMSPA alignment
By supporting their existing workforce with their career goals, One Leisure would be able to improve staff retention and make new posts more attractive to candidates, too.
Gregg describes how they executed this:
“To support these priorities and to ensure we could meet our staff’s needs, we worked in partnership and collaboration with CIMSPA to seek out opportunities whereby we could align our new structures to the sector professional standards, managed by CIMSPA, allowing our staff to develop and achieve CIMSPA-recognised qualifications.
We felt this would allow staff operating in a front-line position the opportunity and space to have live work experience coupled with academic learning and provide them with an opportunity to become professional leisure operators, gaining skills and accreditation on their personal journey.
As a local authority, we provide our employees with the statutory qualifications to undertake their roles as well as a suite of e-learning training that all staff must undertake. What we didn’t have was a syllabus for any wider learning to help them in their role, for example for a recreation assistant on a new multi-skilled contract wanting to progress to become a leisure centre supervisor.
We could offer on-site training and leadership development, but we weren’t able to offer any associated real qualifications. However, with the support of CIMSPA, we are able to offer clear career pathways and learning opportunities. This allows staff to complete training, gain opportunities to be promoted, move up and then continue their development to gain more senior roles again.”
The sport and physical activity professional standards, which were created by expert employers to define sector job roles, working environments and participant populations, offer clarity on what sector professionals should and are able to do within their role.
