Follow the leader with launch of new business training programme

Emerging Leaders will begin in September when businesses can apply to send their rising stars on the scheme.

The firms pay half of the £1,200 per person cost with the rest coming from the state-funded Skills Enhancement Fund, a £50m resource designed to get employers to invest in training.

The courses, each for 14 people initially, will run in York and in an as yet to be decided location in the Leeds-Bradford area.

They are for senior managers, business leaders and those seen as part of a firm’s ‘succession plan’ and are designed to bolster workers’ vision, results and professional goals.

Kevin Downsworth, a director of First Position Performance Development, the firm behind Emerging Leaders, said he hopes more courses will follow next year.

First Position said the priority sectors will vary depending in which part of the region the four month courses take place.

Specialist metals, healthcare technologies, digital and new media, low carbon industries, food and drink, environmental technologies and advanced engineering and advanced manufacturing will be among those areas focused on in Yorkshire.

The courses come as the region’s business support industry contracts because of Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity drive.

Yorkshire Forward is being abolished and replaced by a series of local enterprise partnerships although uncertainty remains over how they will operate.

This time last year the loss of up to 125 posts at Business Link Yorkshire was announced.

The taxpayer-funded organisation is grappling with heavy cuts imposed by the regional development agency and was told to make savings of £4.4m from its annual budget of about £35m.

First Position runs coaching and development programmes and was set up five years ago.

It has also worked with Santander, which bought Bradford & Bingley’s savings arm, technology firm IBM and the University of Bradford.