"Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever"
Mahatma Gandhi
Social Housing Courses
Skills For Housing deliver the most comprehensive and practical skills courses for social housing workers currently available anywhere in the UK.
We specialise in designing training packages on a wide variety of communication skills for all social housing staff, from managers, through team leaders, maintenance staff, advice workers, housing management, homelessness and support staff.
We develop Bespoke Courses with you and we also offer a number of courses to tackle issues that arise in social housing. Here is a list of a small section of the courses we run:-
Aims of the course
For participants to learn how to deal confidently and effectively with others in challenging, aggressive and even potentially violent situations.
Delegates learn how to :-
Identify their own behaviours in relation to challenging encounters.
Get rapport with difficult people and use it to influence the communication.
Utilise non-verbal communication skills to keep situations professional.
Take the heat out of a situation
Read a situation and other’s motivations and behaviours
De-personalise a problem, so that nobody is being blamed.
De-escalate situations that have become highly emotional.
Who should attend
Any staff who deal with members of the public, either in person or on the phone.
This popular and practical course has already been successfully delivered to over 2,000 social housing workers. It develops communication skills for customer facing staff who have to deal with a variety of difficult behaviours from service users.
Ben has 20 years of frontline housing experience behind him.
Starting out as a resettlement worker in a large direct access homelessness shelter in London he moved on to run a hostel for homeless families before becoming a housing adviser for a busy London authority.
He then did 11 years as a Tenancy Relations Officer for the London Borough of Lewisham, prosecuting landlords for harassment and illegal eviction, before moving to the West Country and, for a time, became head of homelessness for West Wiltshire District Council.
He is now a senior partner of Skills-4-Housing and designs and delivers courses regularly for the Chartered Institute of Housing, Shelter, Sitra and many others in the field. He has developed both training and consultancy packages for a wide variety of statutory and voluntary sector bodies around the UK.
Pauline has been training consultant and business coach for the last 10 years. Her clients include the London Probation Service, the National Health Service, the Metropolitan Police and the charity, Shelter.
In the last year, her work involved delivering a Strategic development day for Chief Executives in the public sector. She also was in demand as a speaker presenting at a number of conferences on conflict management, mediation and diversity. She regularly runs a ‘managing people skill’s course for both the private and public sector.
Pauline combines learning practical skills, in a fun and ethical way, respecting that each participant has their own unique view, which contributes to the group dynamic. ‘It's about opening up choices and possibilities, so that people are able to be at their most resourceful, in their work and lives’.
She is a Master Practitioner of NLP and a Certified Trainer of NLP. She also runs open NLP workshops and courses, at Cliff House Hotel and Conference Centre, in Bournemouth where she lives with her family.
After gaining a Bsc Hons in Industrial Business Systems from De Montfort University Neil moved into computing systems management for Kier Western, part of the national company Kier Group.
During this time he has become a recognised teacher of Reiki and practitioner of Indian Head Massage and trained intensively in counselling for grief and bereavement and working with children, before Gaining a Master Practitioners Certificate in NLP and also becoming a Certified Trainer of NLP.
Over the years Neil has specialised in personal change work with individual clients, helping many individuals overcome phobias, limitations, inhibitions and restricting beliefs.
Neil’s approach to training and change work is to work with what the client brings to the table rather than imposing fashionable models or techniques on them, which allows them to develop and process change at their own rate in the manner most comfortable for them.
A humorous and personable presenter he also has a strong interest in working and learning from the behaviour of wolves, for which he is becoming a volunteer trainee for a major UK based wolf support charity.
Personal Development Plans
The problem for both trainers and organisations alike, is that the effectiveness of personal skills courses can be difficult to assess post-training.
What sets Skills For Housing apart from our competitors is our use of structured personal development plans. Most of our courses come with their own 28 day plan, which the participants are required to follow for the month immediately after training. It is designed in such a way as to ensure that real skills are applied to their daily work.
Most courses also come with a variety of multi-media support materials, involving film clips, sound files and access to advice from a dedicated web-blog site set up exclusively for your course delegates.
COURSE DATES
28th Feb - 2nd Mar
Ben has 20 years of frontline housing experience behind him.
Pauline has been training consultant and business coach for the last 10 years. Her clients include the London Probation Service, the National Health Service, the Metropolitan Police and the charity, Shelter.
After gaining a Bsc Hons in Industrial Business Systems from De Montfort University Neil moved into computing systems management for Kier Western, part of the national company Kier Group.
The problem for both trainers and organisations alike, is that the effectiveness of personal skills courses can be difficult to assess post-training.
