Leadership and Management: Management Skills for Employers
Why is the Skills Academy focusing on Management Skills for Personal Employers?
The Skills Academy is driven by the needs of all employers in adult social care and personal employers are the fastest growing group of employers in the sector, with over 50,000 people alone receiving direct payments (Skills for Care report, 2007) and becoming personal employers as part of the move towards Personalisation.
The Skills Academy knows that Personalisation offers massive opportunities for those able to plan their own care through private funding or using an Individual Budgets, but also realises that those employing personal assistants may have little or no experience of managing people as employees. It’s therefore crucial that personal employers have the same skills that someone employing a small number of staff in their business would have, to make sure that everyone involved, care receiver and carers, experience the most from their care/job, and have their rights fully taken care of.
A person-centred approach underpins everything the Skills Academy does, in terms of the provision of courses and endorsement of training, with the goal of supporting the best possible outcomes in social care and this also means the best possible outcomes for people employing their own care assistants directly.
What has the Management Skills for Personal Employers project achieved so far?
We visited personal employers and representative organisations around the country and invited them to local structured discussion groups, in order to identify what training and support they needed.
There were many different points of views but a strong common theme was the need for relevant, comprehensive guidance on the management skills involved in the unique employer/employee relationship.
In response to this feedback we have developed a Management Guide resource, based on the first-hand experience of personal employers and personal assistants. This is the first in a wider range of wider range of resources that we are developing and testing with our established expert group of service user employers and managers, who meet on a regular basis to provide valuable feedback and advice.
What is the Management Skills for Personal Employers project doing right now?
Our Management Guide for Personal Employers is currently being piloted with service users and existing personal employers to enable us to finalise and refine before launching widely across the sector.
What is the next step for the Management Skills for Personal Employers project?
We hope to launch the Management Guide this autumn (this is an estimated timescale) and make it available to Local Authorities to use as a common resource for personal employers in their constituency as well as making it available to service-user led organisations.
How can you get involved in the Management Skills for Personal Employers project?
If you are part of an organisation or network that would find the Management Guide a helpful resource then please get in touch to explore how you might be able to be involved in launching the Guide. If you’d like to register your interest about the project please email