THE TEAM

...business management and consultancy for organisations as diverse as the Home Office, Goldman Sachs, Ernst & Young and Marks & Spencer..

Justin left Arthur Andersen in the late 1990s to create Ashbury Training (Ashbury Educational Services), which he has been running successfully in partnership with James Post ever since.

A skilled communicator he prides himself in leading innovation within L&D and has devised over 100 training and implementation solutions, including the largest training rollout in Europe for Marks & Spencer in 2010/2011.

Justin has developed long term relationships with major organisations such as Ernst & Young and Marks & Spencer that continue to the present day, and is constantly working to ensure Ashbury Training’s portfolio remains fresh and pioneering and offers quality and value to his customers, whilst always remaining flexible to their needs.

Recently Justin co-founded Ashbury Labelling Ltd. A company complimentary to Ashbury Training, it delivers world-class food technology and specification services in combination with professional technology training solutions.

Justin’s insight into the long-term training requirements of multinational corporations, combined with his expertise in retail, have helped propel Ashbury Training into the top 50 training companies in the UK.

...whether it is classroom based IT training or leadership skills courses conducted in muddy fields or halfway up a mountain.

James has honed his teaching skills over the last 10 years through his exposure to diverse industries, cultures and environments.

Gretta White. Mental Health Review Tribunal:

"We were all of the opinion that James is an extremely patient and helpful instructor, with an ability to put those with limited IT skills at ease, and therefore gain maximum benefit from the course."

James began his training career at Admiral Training where he spent three years teaching MS Office and bespoke applications. During this time he managed relationships with major clients such as the Department of Health and divided his time between classroom delivery and developing training materials.

His involvement in training and development weekends for a well-known charity means his personal course portfolio includes Survival Techniques and Rhino tracking (for beginners) - Not the most sought-after courses in the UK, perhaps, but you never know when those skills may come in handy.

After leaving Admiral training James qualified as a certified Cisco trainer. He ran Cisco courses for Equant & France Telecom engineers across Europe and North America.

He also designed a series of training courses for their helpdesk staff covering areas such as bespoke software, telephone skills and how to handle angry customers (now there’s a use for those Rhino skills!)

James’ experience at Equant expanded his IT knowledge from generic desktop applications into networking and telecommunications. The Cisco qualifications courses are amongst the most challenging he has delivered. Understanding how difficult it can sometimes be to absorb complex information quickly means that James strives to find different methods to teach complex subjects in a simple way.

Since setting up Ashbury Training with co-director Justin Davies, James has worked with a number of major companies, managing their training assessment, development and delivery.

Most recently, James managed a training rollout for Marks and Spencer (M&S Project FIND -an internet based bespoke application), writing courses and materials for 500 M&S staff and 640 M&S suppliers. He project-managed a team of trainers and delivered over 200 successful training days across the UK.

The training rollout was widely regarded as the best IT training project ever experienced within M&S.

...to learn in an enjoyable and productive environment. After graduating from the University of Warwick in Engineering, Rob took some well deserved time off to travel.

Once back in the UK, Rob started his training career working in a variety of areas of the utility market, before becoming heavily involved in a range of SAP projects.

These projects lasted from 3 months to 2 years with over 700 delegates involved. It was during this time that Rob developed a very strong testing and material development background. This was also aided by his natural curiosity to learn new systems in depth.

In more lengthy projects that Rob was involved in, he was responsible for building courses from scratch, this involved starting at Training Needs Analysis and course structure setup, all the way through to the training material creation, delivery of courses and post-training support.

The structure of the various projects provided invaluable training experience, due to highly varying conditions and time frames, which have created the rounded trainer he is today. As a lead trainer on projects, Rob has managed highly fluctuating training schemes, increasing his expertise a lot along the way.

In addition, Rob is now an accomplished Microsoft Office trainer and has delivered a variety of bespoke systems training. Robs main focus is always on continuously improving his role as a trainer...

...And getting some travelling in when given the chance!

...of classroom based training, in particular SAP (HR and Payroll). Lauren began her professional career with Surrey County Council where she stared as their Payroll Officer.

Whilst in this role, Lauren developed and honed her planning, development and customer service skills which enabled her transfer to HR Officer. It was here Lauren found her passion for problem solving, management of colleagues and SAP, where she made a quick step up to SAP Trainer. During that time, Lauren expanded her knowledge in Technical skills and Training methods to become a focused and capable trainer.

Today she is one of our most valued trainers and has run courses for clients such as Ernst & Young, Marks & Spencer and Prupim (part of the M&G Group).

John began his career as a graduate trainee in the Rank organisation cutting his teeth in operational management roles in their retail businesses, before moving to a Learning and Development role. From here John became involved in a range of initiatives across Rank, from developing and delivering NEBSM courses, to supporting retail specific training programmes. This grounding in the Training industry allowed John to complete his Diploma in L&D for the Institute of Training and Development.

Following this he took on a senior HR role within a successful national retail business and applied his experience designing and managing programmes for much larger audiences, efforts which were recognised with 3 National Training Awards (best programme, best partnership, and best delivery).

This passion for using Learning to make real differences to people was further developed through working with a range of organisations (including M&S, Intel and Microsoft), sitting on the board of a local college, running management development programmes across a range of sectors, acting as a verifier for the Institute of Leadership and Management, and working with a charity supporting school age children into industry.

John is also a keen mountaineer and to get away from office life he is known to literally head to the hills, and can be found hanging from fingertips or ice axes on rock ridges in the Scottish highlands and the French Alps throughout the year.

Following a recent bespoke course designed and delivered for the NHS senior L&D team the feedback included;

“This training has really opened my eyes to some of the possibilities that exist to develop my role”

“I really enjoyed the balance within the training, introducing high level principles and then breaking that down into workshop activities examining how to take the information back to my workplace”

“John presented the topics very well, making the day highly enjoyable and I’m looking forward to putting some of this into practice now”

“There were some new concepts today and John explained these clearly and helped me plan how to apply them effectively.”

...experience of Sales, Soft Skills, Business and Residential Property Investment Training to deliver bottom line results.

Clayton's desire is to bring to life training results in enjoyable sessions for delegates, and the opportunity to immediately consolidate their learning.

Clayton is active in working with teenagers to help them optimise their skills and maximise their potential, and he is also a keen tennis fan on the lookout to improve his game.