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| Photo Caption: (From left to right) Helen Jane, Roz Wornell, Jane Minnett, Gwawr Price, Gwynfair Owen |
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CEREDIGION RECEIVES JOB BOOST THROUGH TOURISM TRAINING AND SUPPORTT
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| Two closely related tourism projects in Ceredigion have just received Objective 1 fund approval to help the tourism industry in Ceredigion. The projects, called IQM (Integrated Quality Management) and Medrwn will create 2 direct jobs it is hoped that many indirect jobs will be created in the future.Local councillor Ray Quant said,“Both projects work towards the same goal. IQM provides a framework for tourism to flourish, helping to develop tourism as a high quality service and encourage sustainable growth. Medrwn will train the industry up. The projects will help gaining potential competitive advantage in global tourism markets through providing an improved understanding of such markets and how to access them. This is a useful thing for the local community as it helps to build sustainable communities through enhancement of local and regional environmental cultural, social and economic opportunities.”IQM aims to deliver high quality advice and support to 856 tourism related SME’s in Ceredigion – the long-term aim being to increase tourism expenditure by 5%. The main objective is to increase the quality of the tourism experience in rural destinations in Ceredigion. This project will aim towards: increasing the length of the season thereby creating the need for more full time employment; increasing the awareness of high quality tourism initiatives including training and skills enhancement, resulting in a high skilled workforce whose skills employers will want to retain.The aim of the second project Medrwn is to facilitate learning and developing skills that relate to initiatives in tourism quality, specifically for tourism and related SMEs, thereby improving the quality and competitiveness of the tourism product and visitor experience in Mid Wales. 2 facilitators will work at grass roots level within individual operators and existing clusters, including tourism associations, addressing and responding to the specific human resource development issues in order to improve the competitiveness of the tourism industry across Ceredigion and Meirionydd. A fundamental aim of this project is that we improve the overall access to learning and ensure that the content and delivery is flexible and appropriate to meet the needs of the individual or business.
RAISING CEREDIGION TOURISM QUALITY – WE IDENTIFY AND THEY TRAIN
What are the fundamentals of IQM then?
(Roz) To raise the standard/quality of the tourism product, in Ceredigion, so that businesses not only work with each other better, because most businesses don’t know what the others are doing, down the road, so its getting people to communicate, and in that way raise the quality.What knowledge are you passing on?
(Roz) Part of the practical research that we do is visitor satisfaction surveys, business surveys and community audits. They’ve been running from the pilot project onwards, we’ve got 3 years of data, charting exactly what visitors think of the area, and we have asked them to rate the quality of certain aspects of their visit to Ceredigion, so we chart year on year whether they are meeting client expectations. We’ve got things like their training needs, understanding business training needs, what they think of the community they live in, what they would like to improve, what they think other businesses are doing, we need to identify the gaps on what businesses are doing, what they think visitors what, what visitors actually want, what they expect and those gaps. They are called quality gaps…one matches the other. The community audit consists of shoppers basically, we send people off in their communities in Ceredigion, and they just have a checklist to go through on in their community, such as the physical aspects of their locality, hate to go back to public toilets but it always comes up. Whether public toilets are clean, whether the signposts take you in direction that you want to go. Is there a play area? And they look at it from a visitor’s point of view so we can highlight back the development areas and develop an action plan.Do you cover the whole of Ceredigion then or do you have specific target areas?
How much grant aid did you get from Objective 1?
(Roz) No the whole of Ceredigion, although in the pilot areas we are some way forward, 289k.
How do targets work in a tourism way?
(Roz) Because of the measure and priority we don’t provide targets. It’s our job to provide and facilitate. Our targets are businesses or recipients we have advised, training, accreditation, IT, so we can count them obviously as they go through. Also we have targets on visitor expenditure, a percentage that was agreed, we can actually track, we’ve just finished the first year and there are another 2 years to go, so tracking this is not easy.Tell me a bit about what jobs this Objective 1 grant has helped create…
(Roz) My title is research assistant,
MEDRWN THE CONCEPT...So tell me about Medrwn…
(Helen) There was Powys Anticipation which was a similar type of project to Medrwn – it started off, just in Powys, that was a 2 year project, then we were waiting for funding to rollout a new project and there were all sorts of hurdles, so in the end it was decided that we would carry on Anticipation but under a different name. We tried to run it on a very limited scale, through the Mid Wales Tourism Partnership For Wales. We tried to run it across Mid Wales to sort of plug the gap.
So what does Medrwn do in a Nutshell?
(Helen) The aim is the same as the CQTI project – raising tourism quality, we work quite closely with them, they actually identify what the training needs are, and we actually deliver the training. We’re completely training, we’re training. We tend to put people on training together, having identified their training needs already, it takes the form of a networking training event if you like, a specific aspect of tourism, say the Disability Discrimination Act, with access issues, now has a training element, it’s about visitors with disabilities, how to cope with that and bringing businesses together, that haven’t perhaps met before, some anglers for example have met up and then train together in bringing visitors together. There is a cycling day coming up, cycling activity, as a tourism banner in Ceredigion, by making businesses that are on cycle routes aware of what’s happening so that they can benefit, nutrition of cyclists, lots of people there with bikes, hopefully things will spark off, hopefully there might be training courses they might want to go on,
These people needing training, will they have to pay for training?
(Helen) No, its 100% subsidised. Medrwn and IQM work very closely with Tourism Partnership Mid Wales, they are partners of both projects, we work towards their aims and overall strategic objectives for the region as a whole, that’s quite important so there is a synergy I suppose of everybody working together, we all work very closely on the Regional Tourism Strategy, So what have you done in Ceredigion so far?
(Helen) We’ve have so far DDA (Disability Discrimination Act), Internet Day, these are day courses, but they don’t have to be, we’ve done lots of workshops, In Powys we’ve got other things going on, marketing courses, copyright courses, and equine is quite big in Powys, We work very closely across counties so that they are aware of what we are doing and vice versa, cycling is very big in Ceredigion, What jobs have been created as a result of Objectives 1 funding?(Helen) Jobs have been created in Machynlleth, so just outside of Ceredigion, so we can’t use them in our figures, but we do work in Ceredigion – just based outside of. (What are job titles???) So there are other things you want to draw attention to?
(Helen) Just the opportunities for local businesses. The data we have collected from the local visitor surveys is really local data that hasn’t been available before…from the data we are able to find out exactly what the visitors want from the area, their feedback on local businesses.Do you go to the local businesses with any feedback, such as criticisms?
(Helen) In a very positive proactive way, for the pilot areas where we have 3 years of data we can actually chart improvements year on year. So it covers all aspects of tourism then?
(Helen) It’s tourism in the very widest sense. Its any business in Ceredigion which can have any impact on Tourism, a local garage can impact on tourism for example, so really it could be any business really, and the business community as well. Many shops and pubs aren’t really feeling involved in tourism and they don’t really feel the impact that tourism has on their businesses. Trying to make them aware of the potential that there is in tourism, but also trying to understand that they may not want tourism brought to their area, The training creates jobs does it not?
(Helen) Safeguards jobs more than anything. That’s what we are hoping for in Ceredigion, train a business up and they do employ people, and then there is jobs created there. There are a lot of people scared of training because they haven’t done anything since they left school. I think it is important to say as well that neither project duplicates the other. Another thing as well is tourism development is not actually encouraging more tourists to come here, its about raising their expenditure, younger higher spending people. With the cycle routes, making sure in Ceredigion that they go past as many attractions and tourism businesses as possible. Visitors are changing, the visitor survey has been very satisfying, being able to chart the type of visitor into the area, the businesses who didn’t seem to realise that the tourism market is changing that much, and you see the light coming on in their eyes. It’s been good, letting them know what the market changes are, Email contact: info@iqmwales.co.uk Tel: 01970622247 (Jane). |
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