Bl**y business link - what a waste of time!

[peebles]

Sorry, I have to vent here.

Hubby is MD of a joinery firm. I officially work for him - as a finance manager, looker after of his children, cooker, cleaner etc. I reckon I'm worth at least £50K a year....

Anyway, once the kids are at school i want to go back to work, on my terms though so i can fit in with the kids etc. hubby saw an advert on the tv saying the government is willing to train anyone under the train to gain scheme, so he said i should phone up and get some training. i already have a whole load of qualifications but i really want the PRINCE 2 (project management) qualification to help with my business consultancy practice and i wondered if i could get funding for it.

so i phoned them and said it would greatly help hubby's business as we expect it to go far and PRINCE 2 would give us a structured approach to the future projects. why was i even wasting my breath? they put me through to business link. 'sorry all of our advisers are busy at the moment, but they will ring you back within 24 hours'. i sat patiently waiting for 24 hours and no phone call. on day 2 i rang business link and got put through to an adviser. YAY!

she went through our whole marketing and business plan and then after THIRTY minutes said she couldn't help and we should set up a meeting. this 30 minutes entailed me rocking my baby to sleep to hush him up and playing with my toddler, when my ONLY question was 'will i get funding for PRINCE 2?

she then sent me an email.... requesting that at the meeting i bring along a cashflow forecast, business plans, etc etc.

flipping heck!!! all this work for WHAT?

i emailed her back and said i think it would be a waste of time and all i wanted was to know whether for f***s sake (although never said this) i would GET FUNDING FOR PRINCE 2? she said she would cancel appointment and get a skills broker to contact me.

3 days later he did. he was very wishy washy and said he would email me a list of providers for the PRINCE 2 course... that was a week ago and still no email.

so my questions are

a) who pays the wages for business link?
b) what exactly are they there for?
c) do they ever deliver or/and add value?

peebles.

[NetConneXions]

You were expecting to go there with plate in hand and they just drop the money on it?

Sorry but it seems like you wernt willing to put the effort in.

[peebles]

No. sorry my point is i went with a specific question, 'Is there any funding for a PRINCE 2 course?' and the bl**dy rigmaroll (SP!) i had to even get half way there is shocking. why coudln't i have a straight yes or no answer?

[peebles]

may i add that we've already BEEN through this a year ago and they offered no support whatsoever towards our training for our joiners. the best help has been CITb - they're fantastic.

[DavidT]

I do realise services from organisations such as BusinessLink may not be perfect, but like Phillip, it seems you were expecting to just get without putting in the effort required first.

I don't know anything about Prince 2, the funding or requirements but to me there's no surprise that government support through initiatives like this would need certain requirements to be met and an assessment of some type - not simply "Thanks for your call, yes we will provide you with support".

I would think business plans, financial forecasting (Cash Flow, P&L etc) are fairly standard requirements to provide to someone you want to answer your question.

David Toohey
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[Esk247]

no i think peebles is saying that they were just wishy washy in general....and with my experience, they are...they rarely give straight answers..they take up your whole day and you have to see a list of 'ADVISORS' who try to tell you how to run your business even though they rarely understand internet based businesses and many have never run a successful company themselves..they have no experience in that field and stick to a booklet which you could read in your spare time instead of spending a whole afternoon at a business link office

[sysops]

Hubby is MD of a joinery firm. I officially work for him - as a finance manager, looker after of his children, cooker, cleaner etc. I reckon I'm worth at least £50K a year....

<snip>

she then sent me an email.... requesting that at the meeting i bring along a cashflow forecast, business plans, etc etc.

flipping heck!!! all this work for WHAT?

<snip>

i emailed her back and said i think it would be a waste of time and all i wanted was to know whether for f***s sake (although never said this) i would GET FUNDING FOR PRINCE 2? she said she would cancel appointment and get a skills broker to contact me.

Wow, you could whinge at an Olympic level.

Firstly, your personal situation, and your estimated £50k a year are totally irrelevant. The latter is undoubtedly also totally inaccurate.

Second, what exactly were you expecting?

Third, don't waste your time on useless management qualifications. Spend your time learning about your business, analysing its processes, and planning how to improve those processes. You can slap a PRINCE 2 on any idiot, and it rarely makes any difference. Even less so if you are working for your own company.

Get over it, and focus on improving you business and your life.

[Cromulent]

Get over it, and focus on improving you business and your life.

I like that advice :).

You would probably get more from spending £100 on worthwhile books from Amazon. Some of them can be very useful you just need to pick the right ones.

[sysops]

You would probably get more from spending £100 on worthwhile books from Amazon. Some of them can be very useful you just need to pick the right ones.

Absolutely, there are some fantastic books out there. You can also learn a hell of a lot from talking to other people, both irl and on fora.

[Esk247]

Third, don't waste your time on useless management qualifications. Spend your time learning about your business, analysing its processes, and planning how to improve those processes. You can slap a PRINCE 2 on any idiot, and it rarely makes any difference. Even less so if you are working for your own company.

this is what i say to people that ask me if business link was any help for my business....princes trust was much much better by the way, atleast they find an advisor that is actually interested in your business and gets you in contact with the inland revenue and the correct paperwork for registering the business..when you first start out you really don't have any idea where to go or what order to do things in.

[tom111]

I like that advice :).

You would probably get more from spending £100 on worthwhile books from Amazon. Some of them can be very useful you just need to pick the right ones.

Or just go to the library and get the books for free :)

[Esther]

I understand your frustration Peebles, you just want a 'yes we'll help you' then you know it's worth putting the work in. If you're juggling a young family and your husband's business it's all about prioritising your time right?

Personally I wouldn't bother with Prince 2. I studied for this qualification then worked as an IT Project Manager for 7 years and hardly ever got to put it into practice. Now DSDM on the other hand has been much more useful (and far simpler to put into practice).

[Cornish Steve]

You were expecting to go there with plate in hand and they just drop the money on it?
That's not what I read. Peebles asked a simple question that could have been answered 'yes' or 'no'. Instead, someone wasted 30 minutes of her busy day and never answered the question.

A basic rule in business: Answer the question!

[Faith28]

Unfortunately I had a similar problem with the Train2Gain programme.

Spent days going through their beauracracy, meeting a skills broker, on the telephone with them only to be eventually told that 'oh dear, you should have said your emoployees have qualifications, I'm afraid you will not get funding for their sales and marketing courses'.

Unfortunately I couldn't afford to pay for their time off work so had to lay one off as her job was then redundant if she couldn't get the skills to work in another role within the business.

Maybe I should bill Train2gain for my time.

[sm1]

It seems that whilst you were only trying to understand whether or not you could get funding, they took it that you wanted it and were seeing if you fit the criteria. Due to this, they obviously started to probe to see if you qualified for it.

Cheers

[Cornish Steve]

This is one of the most annoying habits we encounter in business. We ask a supplier a simple question, for example, and they go rabbiting on for half an hour and never actually answer the question - probably because the answer is 'no' and they don't want to admit it.

Yes, Eiman, you should be allowed to charged these people for your time. They seem to forget that time is money. They may not have anything better to do, but you have plenty.

[Cromulent]

How can they answer that question without first ascertaining whether she qualifies or not?

If they didn't find that out they would just have to answer no to be on the safe side because they are not aware of the facts.

If I ring a bank up and ask "Can I have a loan?", I don't expect a yes or no answer. I expect to answer some questions and then based on the answers I have given then been told the outcome. Expecting anything less is foolish in the extreme and rather naive I might point out.

[Esk247]

How can they answer that question without first ascertaining whether she qualifies or not?

If they didn't find that out they would just have to answer no to be on the safe side because they are not aware of the facts.

no but they wasted her time in the first place..if they said 'right, come round tomorrow at 9am sharpish and you'll meet our advisors' then you'd think great...then spend a day there going through forms, if you don't qualify they can help you get grant funding for something or offer you some really great advice..if you do qualify then they can help you get the qualifications etc etc.

from the way i read it...they took ages to answer the phone...then didn't really know what they were talking about..gave no advice, wasted someones time and where rather rubbish..considering they are on a full days wage for it..the person visiting them isn't getting paid for that wasted day and infact it costs them money.

[movietub]

no i think peebles is saying that they were just wishy washy in general....and with my experience, they are...they rarely give straight answers..they take up your whole day and you have to see a list of 'ADVISORS' who try to tell you how to run your business even though they rarely understand internet based businesses and many have never run a successful company themselves..they have no experience in that field and stick to a booklet which you could read in your spare time instead of spending a whole afternoon at a business link office

Exactly. Business link 'Advisors' always suffer from one inescapable truth. If they were able to advise a broad range of businesses how to improve and do so effectively, each one of them could in fact be the next Richard Branson. Their capacity to advise is limited in the same way a banker or accountants is - they can tell you what to do to stop things going badly wrong but not what to do make a success of the business. That is a personal journey each business person must travel. You become the expert at what you do. The fact they double as human encyclopedias on rules and regs is also a little pointless in a world where all the texts they read from are available within seconds via a Google search.

I would say to the OP why do you want a qualification? Qualifications don;t make people good at their jobs (unless it is an academic career they follow - i.e. I'm glad my dentist follows the textbook!), qualifications simply serve to demonstrate to a potential employer that in a particular area you have proven you can think in the correct way to solve problems and have been tested to show that you have learnt and can recite the basic principals, and general subject knowledge. Its not a guarentee that the person will be very good at the job, just means at worse they will be 'passable'.

In your position I assume you have the job by default so a qualification is not required. You should surely know enough to know if you are good at the job or not?

I frequently manage several large projects side by side and I left school at 14 without a single qualification. Genuinly the only exam I ever took qualified me to swim 50m without drowning. Even thats been of no use unless at some point I'm on a cruise and it sinks 50m from the shore.

The most suprising thing is I have shocking organisational skills and I'm a lazy communicator. But I have learned what I need to by doing the job, as a result as far as doing my job goes there is no one better!

[Cromulent]

no but they wasted her time in the first place..if they said 'right, come round tomorrow at 9am sharpish and you'll meet our advisors' then you'd think great...then spend a day there going through forms, if you don't qualify they can help you get grant funding for something or offer you some really great advice..if you do qualify then they can help you get the qualifications etc etc.

from the way i read it...they took ages to answer the phone...then didn't really know what they were talking about..gave no advice, wasted someones time and where rather rubbish..considering they are on a full days wage for it..the person visiting them isn't getting paid for that wasted day and infact it costs them money.

Yes they were slow initially but when she got through they started to work with her.

She actually posted this:

she went through our whole marketing and business plan and then after THIRTY minutes said she couldn't help and we should set up a meeting. this 30 minutes entailed me rocking my baby to sleep to hush him up and playing with my toddler, when my ONLY question was 'will i get funding for PRINCE 2?

the bold bit indicates to me that she wanted to get through ask her question, receive a yes or no answer and put the phone back down again.

[Cornish Steve]

How can they answer that question without first ascertaining whether she qualifies or not?
You ask questions. You don't give a pat 30-minutes presentation and then tell someone to come back another time. Anyone worth their salt ought to be able to answer the question in 5 minutes, tops.

[kerching]

If you want funding for this course then you are going to have to present all the information that Business Link require.
Giving out money willy nilly is why this county finances are in such a mess.
Or pay for it your self if you are so convinced that it will be of benefit to you and your company.
PRINCE2 Foundation E-Learning Pack - £469+VAT I have seen being advertised by one company on the net.
Good luck....

[peebles]

Hi again,

I'm sorry, I maybe tried to cut a very long story too short!

The reason I want PRINCE 2 is for my future career - MINE not hubbys. don't think i want to be general dogsbody for the rest of my life! I'm from a finance background and I want to offer consultancy services. A lot of the potential contracts require PRINCE 2 as a standard. Thats the main reason I want it. I did say this to business link but also since my business isn't set up yet and I don't want it to be until my kids are at school, I focused on needing it for hubby's established joinery business.

If BL had said to me, 'right, in order to apply for funding we need to assess your business. We need P/L, report X, report Y, report Z etc...' I would have gladly took it on board and done it to apply. But the whole purpose of the meeting was because BL offer support to assess your whole business and marketing plan and blah blah. That is what they would have been doing, NOT answering my question or even attempting to get me funding. That would have had to come from a skills broker, who would contact me seperately.

I told her the meeting sounded like a waste of time and she said she'd cancel the meeting and just get the skills broker to contact me. This was after the 30 minute conversation, plus after waiting for 2 days for the email which stated I should bring these documents to the meeting.

Another 3 days passed and the skills broker rang! WAHOO! who just sounded very wishy washy. I can't put my finger on it, he just gave the overall impression that he didn't really care to be honest. He said that there is funding available and I would have to go through an application form and he would have to come and see me. I said 'great!'. But the first thing I have to do is find a provider who are on BL's 'list of suppliers' kind of thing. He said he would email me a list of providers. That was over a week ago and I've had nothing, and I never got his direct number so now in order to contact him and chase it up I'm going to have to ring.... yip Business Link..

Sorry for the misunderstanding. To the person who told me that £50K a year is irrelevant etc etc, I'll just ignore that outburst! LOL you know, it was a joke.. it is serious though really LOL if women got paid for housewifery and motherhood, you men wouldn't be able to afford us :p

[Cornish Steve]

if women got paid for housewifery and motherhood, you men wouldn't be able to afford us :p
Too true. When people ask whether my wife works, I tell them she works harder than I do - but as a homemaker and mother at home.

[ginantonic]

Just a word of warning about discussing BusinessLink Advisors in forums...I applied for a loan through them, and after several meetings, days and days spent tearing my hair out doing a business plan, getting it sent back to me several times, re-doing it, and re-doing it again, I finally found a small charity willing to loan to start up businesses. I found them myself after much Googling, and they were very helpful, with far fewer hoops to jump through than BusinessLink.
I casually mentioned in a forum (not this one!) that I found BusinessLink advisors lacking in knowledge and that I'd found myself a loan with a charity that he didn't even know existed (and that he should have done, as they were in the same town!).
I got a very angry phone call from him demanding to know what the **** I was doing slagging a BL advisor off in a forum! Apparently, they have staff members who are specifically given the job of reading forums, etc.....
Presumably the Govt still funds them. I had a job as a Govt funded careers advisor, and we were paid to "signpost" rather then "do". Maybe BL are like this now, and fulfil their stats this way, so they don't actually have to "do" anything?

[peebles]

Blimey, what happened to freedom of speech?

If you're right and BL are there to signpost they should say so, rather than going through a whole load of rigmarol when they have no valid advice to offer. They set themselves up as a free business consultancy when in fact they're not. Maybe if they told people what they could actually do then our expectations would match their delivery and we wouldn't get so upset about them.

Well done in sourcing the charity.

[kerching]

Having dealt with business link recently,I found them to be very helpful.
I requested an info pack, with it be delivered a few day's later.
Peebles - I like the idea that you want to study Prince2 and then work in an industry that you know.
I have worked along side IT project manager's Prince 2 Qualified,soon realsiing that I knew more that they did IT wise that is.