Jenny Storey and Kate Berry are directors of training centre The Academy and salon Urban Retreat in Glasgow.
Ahead of the Professional Beauty awards, where they are finalists, they tell Erin Leybourne how they are tailoring training to meet changing industry needs.
What inspired your spa traineeship programme?
Jenny Storey: “In Scotland, we don’t have an apprenticeship scheme like there is in England, and there’s obviously a huge employment crisis within the spa industry right now. We had worked with a couple of spas doing CPD courses, and they told us their concerns over lack of staff so we started thinking, would they swallow the cost if we put a private traineeship together? We’re not allowed to call it an apprenticeship because it’s not government based, so we call it a traineeship. Our awarding body is Cibtac. We can’t get funding in Scotland
for it, we’re still campaigning to get it, so the spas have to take that leap of faith.”
Kate Berry: “A lot of spas were concerned that people were coming out of college with full beauty qualifications, and often the spas don’t need things like lashes, brows and waxing so they wanted to cherry-pick the parts they needed to make it more of a spa therapist traineeship.”
What can spas benefit from funding their staff to take a course like this?
KB: “A lot of people from the hotel groups we work with are recruiting from within the
hotels. One group put the traineeship as an opportunity in their newsletter and were
inundated by the number of team members who wanted to be therapists.”
JS: “It’s also good for them in the aspect that they lock therapists into a contract for
a couple of years, because they’re paying that out for the qualifications, so then they
know that they’ve got a stable staff base for a set period of time as well.”
Do you think the rising costs announced in the Autumn Budget will stop a lot of people
taking on apprentices and trainees?
JS: “100%. It’s a lot of money to pay out and I think we’re losing the grasp of reality here. I know an apprenticeship is not very well paid, but it does go up every year because
their skill set’s improving, and they’re learning key skills on the job that they wouldn’t normally learn anywhere else.”
KB: “It’s so hard for small businesses nowadays. Not only are the Government putting the apprenticeship wage up, but for actual members of staff, they’re raising the National Insurance rate. They put the minimum wage up every year, which I love the idea of, but as a small business, when we put our prices up every year to match that, the customers are not happy.
“It’s a really difficult pressure on businesses to constantly keep increasing that, while all your overheads are going up every year as well. There are not realistic expectations for small businesses.”
Can you tell us about your next project – a “Bridge the Gap” initiative for aesthetic therapists?
JS: “As we know, legislation is being discussed whereby anybody who delivers advanced treatments such as peels or microneedling must have a Level 4 Ofqual-regulated qualification. Our ‘Bridge the Gap’ initiative is looking at individuals that’ve been in the industry for many years and have been doing these treatments safely but need this final qualification.
“They have to submit lots of evidence to show where they initially trained, how many clients they do these procedures on in a week, how long they’ve been doing these procedures for, then they sit a kind of trade test with us, so we can see that they’re competent in the
procedures. After that, they have to go away and study more theory to sit the end point exam.
“If it was an individual that hadn’t trained before, they’d be coming in to do this qualification over three months. Someone who has been working in the industry for many
years will need a much shorter time because they’ve already got the practical side, it’s more the theory and underpinning knowledge. So, Bridge the Gap gets them the qualification, but they’re saving about £1,000 and a lot of time.”
On the topic of your salon, you guys are finalists for team of the year at the PB Awards – what makes a good team in your opinion?
JS: We've learned some lessons over the years, we always used to think it was skillset. It's not, you can teach skillset, it has to be the right people.
We constantly say: “your vibe attracts your tribe”, so they're all very different but they all get on so well and it massively conveys to your clients.
They can feel the energy when they walk into the salon and the fact that everybody's happy.
To network with Storey and Berry amongst our other amazing finalists across 10 categories, come to the Professional Beauty Awards on March 2, 2025. Click here to get your tickets!
