We are pleased to say that Swarm Training have been approved as a “Disability Confident” employer at Level 1. We start this journey with so much excitement to keep working on improving working conditions for everyone, no matter what your situation. If you want to work, we want to encourage you to do so, and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to do a great job and achieve your potential. This is at the heart of our whole business purpose and it is in all of our staff. It’s why we are together and why we do what we do in apprenticeship training.
Being part of the Disability Confident programme is an important commitment for us because we’re all still learning and refining what ‘the right balance’ looks like for each individual, and that will, of course, keep evolving. Being connected with experts in this field who can support and guide us, will enable us to keep following best practice.
All of our staff have a part to play in our Continuous Improvement culture. This is not just through ongoing work on their own professional development but also to respectfully help each other to do things better too. A big part of this is understanding each other’s challenges, understanding neuro-diversities, understanding physical disabilities and any other health conditions which affect our daily lives. We embrace impactful practices of flexible working, AI tools, specific hardware and software, or just enabling people to receive written communications in a different format.
That doesn’t mean we’re happy to accept lower quality work, we have very high standards and expect our team to show commitment and great performance. We all have work to be done and need to make sure the business is successful. But Disability Confident actually means we can enable someone to do higher quality work through making appropriate adjustments for genuine health conditions. This has such a positive effect on someone’s mental health and job satisfaction when they see what they can do and not what they can’t do! That in itself fuels people to grow even more.
As much as we have only just become registered as a Disability Confident employer, we have been following our own internal programme for many years. We’ve always been happy to offer this kind of support to our learners and have helped many clients get that balance right for their apprentices and, in turn, reap the rewards for their businesses.