Thank you for visiting our website to learn more about the courses we offer, about our school and the people involved in it. We appreciate that there are literally hundreds of RYA schools out there to choose from and deciding which one to invest your money with is not always an easy choice.
As we have outlined in the ‘About Us’ section Powerboat Training UK was founded in 2000 and so is one of the few RYA Training Centres that has been around for 25 years. Hopefully in itself that says something and we’re proud to be working with many of the same companies we have worked with since the start and with many of our leisure customers we’re delighted to be training the second or even third generation or their families.
Running any business is hard work and we’re delighted to still strive to provide the exceptionally high level of service to our clients as we have always done – we want to treat our customers in the way that we would like to be treated ourselves.
We’ve never aspired to be the cheapest school out there as frankly we are firmly of the view that you get what you pay for and having really good equipment, classrooms, being in great marinas and paying our team members well means investing and not scrimping. We have long since realised that our clients share that view which is why the come to train with us – and then return.
One of the easiest things to do nowadays is to create a really good looking website at minimal cost and make your business look really good. This is of course a great thing and we all benefit from that however the downside is that it can make it harder to differentiate between businesses.
In deciding which training centre has real substance and therefore where to invest your training time and money hopefully the following checklist will prove useful.
- How long has the business been around? Being around for a long time doesn’t actually prove a business is worth dealing with but in a challenging competitive environment it can be a useful positive.
- What’s your initial impression of your contact with the school like? What a website looks like and how it presents the business clearly plays a part in this but delve around the website, is there depth to the sections on each of the courses, are there photos of the centre, its boats, its classrooms and those involved in the centre. Are there comments from clients?
- In terms of your contact with the centre how do they handle this? We like many small businesses do struggle with the multitude of contact points – phone, email, web forms, instagram, facebook messenger and the like but we are always happy to schedule a call. It may be that you can’t initially get through on the phone but drop us an email and we’ll get a call lined up to chat through what course best suits.
- Have the school’s instructors been with them for a while? Have they a breadth of experience and actually been out there and spent the time of the water rather than purely instructing. Do they have the experience to teach both on schools boats and on a variety of client boats?
- Does the centre often post messages on Instructor Facebook Groups for instructors to fill gaps at short notice? We all have lots of requests at short notice to deliver training and this can be really challenging to resource. However, we will never allocate an instructor to a client and their training that hasn’t been through our induction process and that tends to take a few weeks to achieve all of the steps that entails. If that means we cannot fulfil a request then whilst disappointing we’d rather that’s the case than have someone train for us that we cannot vouch for. In today’s world with its focus on everyone’s safety and the RYA requirements to induct and monitor your instructors we cannot see how it’s possible to meet these requirements with freelancers we don’t already work with.
- Are there plenty of course dates available for the more common courses? This seems a really basic requirement but it does strike us as a little strange how some centres have so few dates scheduled or on the other hand literally schedule them every day of the week. Neither seems a logical scenario for a busy centre.
- Can these courses be booked online or for those where there aren’t dates scheduled is there simple means to request dates that work for you? The booking system we installed in 2021 has worked really well to enable those keen to book with us to do so when works for them. The system manages the communications process and payments and makes it easier to have an overview of all that we have going on – which is lots!
- There are many RYA Training Centres out there so is there something different about the centre that you are looking at that justifies the investment – additional recognition from other agencies etc
Ultimately though words are cheap and easy to write so put us to the test, call or email us and see how we deal with your enquiry. Perhaps pop in for a coffee or tea if that is feasible and form a view first hand about us. Whilst we would never be arrogant enough to suggest that we can answer every question we’ll be honest enough to say if can’t, and equally if we feel another school would better serve your needs then we’ll say so.
We look forward to hearing from you and welcoming you to the school.
