Jumpstart has revolutionised its training, client service and professional development capability with its industry-leading Jumpstart Academy.
The Academy, which is open to all of Jumpstart’s staff and sales associates, has reduced the time it takes to bring its technical analysts fully up to speed with legislative complexities from 12 months to three.
The new concept in knowledge dissemination has also created an unparalleled consistency and quality among the technical analysts, most of whom are educated to PhD level.
Jumpstart director Richard Edwards, who has been mainly responsible for creating the Academy and defining the content of its courses, said:
“We have created a central repository of knowledge that ensures we apply our specialist knowledge in a highly consistent way. This means that our clients experience the same level of service and knowledge irrespective of which of our staff they speak to.”
The Edinburgh-based company, has successfully submitted over 2100 R&D tax relief claims since 2008 and has recovered £43 million for its customers. Nearly two thirds of its clients are in Scotland, but it is now expanding into the rest of the UK, with similarly exciting results.
Mr Edwards said: “As a knowledge-based business, it is really important for us to have consistency in the best available information and share that with our staff.
“The Academy arose from the fact that we were hiring technical analysts and training them in a very intensive, one-to-one process. This could take about 12 months during which time they sometimes developed inconsistent ideas about how to interpret or apply what can be a quite subjective piece of guidance to the legislation.
“As we grew quickly, consistency became a significant issue and the Academy was designed to ensure that people had the right knowledge in a scaleable way. They can now go through all the modules relevant to their particular job or role within three months, though they can take the courses at their own pace.”
Mr Edwards developed the first tranche of content but company staff can now introduce modules which, when checked by Quality Assurance, can be entered into the Academy for sharing with everyone else.
He said:
“The Academy lets us do much faster testing, with multiple choice assessments giving people an instant check on how fully they have registered the content. Prior to the establishment of the Academy, we had written exams, which were time-consuming to administrate.”
The Academy concept is likened in Jumpstart to an onion, in which the inner core is the Finance Act which is the basis of the legislation and the next layer is the HMRC’s Corporate Intangibles R&D manual, which is how the tax authorities interpret the Act. The outer layer is Jumpstart’s content, which essentially is information for its staff on how to interpret HMRC’s guidance to the legislation.
“It makes us very flexible,” said Mr Edwards. “For instance, if HMRC change their interpretation or their direction on a particular point, we can make the change to our training material, ensure everyone is re-certified and check who has done particular courses.”
The Academy has been hugely successful in the sales process, since it demonstrates to clients how much effort the company has invested, and that its level of knowledge justifies the process.
Competitors, he said, continue to struggle both to find appropriate staff and train them quickly enough. The Academy at Jumpstart, in contrast, covers all roles from technical delivery, customer services, finance, quality to field sales.
The ethics and culture of the business are now being built into the Academy’s core structures, though Mr Edwards said that at the moment it was a work in progress.
“It has been very black and white so far in creating material relating to what we do,” he said. “What we’d like to do is open up the Academy to make it more supportive of material relating to how we do things as well.
“That will start to cover softer aspects, such as how we engage with clients, how we define excellent customer service or sales techniques and tips. It can be much broader in scope.”
