Whether on the road with major recording artists like David Bowie and local stars The Coral, or organising the sound system for a business conference Adlib Audio is a Merseyside company that prides itself on offering excellent service to its diverse and everexpanding client base.

The company specialises in the supply of sound and lighting systems for live events and the manufacture of loudspeakers.
From its South Liverpool headquarters Adlib Audio’s 35-strong team covers the length and breadth of the country and further afield if the job requires it — when they were chosen to provide equipment for David Bowie’s last European tour they visited 15 countries in three months.

Because every job is different and requires a broad range of skills, from technical installation expertise to being able to move and handle equipment safely, the company needed to cover an equally broad range of training, which is why the flexibility of the SkillWorks programme was so important.

The company selected St Helens Chamber from the approved suppliers because of its close links with industry and business.
Employees have now received training in several subjects including asset management computer systems, portable appliance testing, forklift truck driving, health and safety rigging, risk assessment
and HGV driving.

Technical Director David Kay said: “We believe in home-grown talent. We take on school leavers and train them in-house
because we tended to find that people coming into the industry later who thought they could do the job soon found out that
they couldn’t.

“Having the right employees is vitally important. You can have as much equipment as you like but if the people who are representing you out there aren’t right you won’t get the job again. Everyone
who works for us takes a very personal approach to their job and we know that helps us win more work. There are larger companies than us but we are successful because of our people.

“We had been trying for many years to find a training route for our employees. It was problematical because we didn’t fit into any
particular ‘box’, such as a trade like plumbing or engineering, and there wasn’t any assistance available. We operate within tight profit margins so that was a major consideration for us.

“Through SkillWorks we have been able to say, ‘we need training in this or that skill’ and it doesn’t weigh us down financially.
This is really exciting for us because we are now able to invest in our workforce in the way we have always wanted to.

“We were also able to sit down with our adviser Ken Tilston, who was very helpful, discuss what we needed and formulate a
training plan, which is something we previously had to do on our own.

“This is a long-term commitment for us. We are coming to the end of our first phase and have achieved what we set out to do, now we are looking at the future. The training has been what we wanted, when we wanted it, we couldn’t have done that without SkillWorks”.

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