Training Opportunities at the East Malling Centre
Today's Guest Blog is written by Caroline Noakes, a student on some of our recent courses. Caroline started her studies with a Beauty Training course funded by Clarion Housing and provided by BC Beauty Training -
The first week came around very quickly and with a certain amount of trepidation I went along to meet all the other girls who I would be training with to complete all our registration forms. This was done with lots of giggling and anxious looks when we realised that by the end of the 5 weeks of training we would all need to strip down to have a spray tan done!
The first week of actual training, learning how to give a manicure and how to apply gel polish, we all met in the centre café, all wondering what we were getting ourselves into.
For me, this was an area that was completely new to me, never having really had any interest in doing nails or beauty, but I really wanted to learn something new and see if I could make any kind of career from it.
The whole 5 weeks flew by with lots of different personalities all mixed together, lots of fun, some rather strange questions but by the end of the course we were all more than comfortable with stripping down in order for us to give each other a spray tan.
Once we had completed our spray tans, we all got ourselves dressed up to the nines and had a presentation ceremony. We were given all or our certificates to confirm our diplomas, and along with a lovely buffet provided by Liz, we were all given a starter kit of items we had requested depending on which area of beauty we wished to carry on with to help us on the way.
A couple of weeks later, we came back to see two lovely gentlemen from the New Enterprise Allowance, who talked to us about starting our own businesses. We were asked at this time if we would all like to have a course to help us in developing our own businesses to which we all said we would like.
The course was called Develop Your Enterprise and was held over 4 days from the 27th April and finishing on the 9th May. The course was given by David DiCara on behalf of Ixion, again funded by Clarion Housing.
This was a very intense course, which covered everything from start-up costs through to networking, marketing through to cash flow forecasts. The one thing we all got from this course is that we all knew a lot more than we thought we did about starting up a business and that we all tried to over complicate things when all we needed to do was look at the easy things which tended to be all we needed.
Thanks must go out to Clarion Housing for funding the courses, to Julie Berry for helping to organise the courses and answering our many questions on what to do next, to Maria and Laura from BC Beauty Training for being excellent trainers and to David DiCara on behalf of Ixion for helping us understand how to run a successful start-up business.