Skills and Training fund for small and micro-sized construction businesses
What this fund is for
The Skills and Training fund aims to help small and micro construction companies to deliver high quality learning and development experiences to employees. It provides extra incentive to access CITB grant eligible training. From 2020, it also supports a wider range of activity, with a greater emphasis on innovation, and management and leadership training. Please refer to the Guidance notes (PDF, 197KB) for further details.
Please note, in order to manage a significant reduction in the budget available to support these funds in 2020/21, it will only be possible to support the top scoring applications each month. In order to maximise your chance of success please read the guidance notes carefully, fully answer all questions and do not exceed your funding allowance.
Who can apply for funding
You can apply if:
- you are a CITB-registered employer
- you have 1-99 directly employed staff on the payroll (employees must be in addition to yourself / business owner)
- any previous project paid for by the Skills and Training fund has been signed off as complete.
You can apply for funding once every 12 months.
How much can you apply for
CITB-registered employers can apply for funding related to how many direct employees they have:
- Employers with 1 to 49 directly employed staff can receive up to £5000.
- Employers with 50 to 74 directly employed staff can receive up to £7500.
- Employers with 75 to 99 directly employed staff can receive up to £10000.
Before you apply
Make sure you've read and understood these documents
You can also discuss your application with your local CITB Adviser, who will be happy to assist and ensure your application form has been completed correctly and all of the questions have been answered clearly e.g. Value for Money & Quality.
How to apply
Please complete the Skills and Training application form (Excel, 287KB)
For further guidance and support when completing your application form, please watch our 'how to' video
- Download the application form and save it to your computer
- Complete all fields, saving regularly along the way to prevent loss of data
- Please make sure the training activity is in the future and not in the past. We are unable to fund retrospective activity
- Save and send the completed form to skills.training@citb.co.uk.
What happens next?
The Skills and Training team will review and score all applications at the end of each submission window (typically at the end of each calendar month).
You should receive a decision from us (by email) around the 15th of the month after your application was submitted e.g. if you apply any time during the month of July you will have a decision from us around 15 August. We would appreciate if you did not chase a response within this period and we will inform everyone as soon as possible.
CITB will review and score all applications against the fund criteria (as set out in the Guidance Notes). The top scoring applications from each month will be approved for funding.
Approved: Your application meets the Skills & Training fund criteria and will be processed for payment.
Declined: Based on the information supplied your application has not scored highly enough or does not meet the criteria for Skills and Training Fund. Where it does not meet the criteria, this could be for a variety of reasons, such as:
- you have not submitted a levy return
- you are behind on your levy payments
- you have not supplied enough information
- you are asking for courses or activity that are outside the fund criteria.
We will advise you clearly why we have declined your application or will communicate this via your local CITB Adviser. You can re-submit an improved application in future months but only the top scoring applications from each month will be approved for funding.
After the funding payment has been approved you can start your training activity. Please remember to keep evidence of all invoices as you will need to submit these to CITB to demonstrate that the training has taken place.
As your funding agreement approaches its expected completion date you will receive a reminder e-mail from us requesting evidence of expenditure and asking you to populate this completion tracker (MS Excel, 325KB). If you require guidance on how to fill out this completion tracker, please watch this video.
We will also ask you to complete this survey to share your feedback with us.
Your evidence and completion tracker should be sent to skills.training@citb.co.uk within 28 days of receiving the e-mail. If you are experiencing challenges with finalising your training programme, please contact us to request an extension.
If your business needs and circumstances change, please contact us as soon as possible at skills.training@citb.co.uk and we can discuss alternative arrangements with you. This could result in the money being returned or agreeing to a new training schedule.
We may wish to publish details of your project on our website once funding has been approved.
We may ask to work with you to develop press releases, case studies or promotional videos relating to your project either during delivery, or upon completion.