A MEDICAL technologies business is accelerating its growth plans after taking advantage of local training grants designed to upgrade skills.

Skipton based Broughton Laboratories, which specialises in analysing and testing pharmaceutical products, has used training support from the Leeds city region Local Enterprise Partnership to set the foundations for future development.

Since starting in 2006, the firm has gone from employing two staff to 48 and turnover has also been steadily increasing to the current £2.6 million and expected to rise to £3.3 million at the end of the financial year.

The company is set to move from its current site into bespoke premises more than quadruple the current size and expects to create more than 60 new jobs in the next three years. It has longer term aspirations of employing 120 staff and seeing turnover rise to £10 million by 2021.

The heavily regulated business approached the LEP skills service for staff to undertake leadership and management training as well as 5S training, a workplace organisation method designed to improve efficiency, quality and employee safety.

LEP funding and support enabled Broughton to do two rounds of training involving 32 staff.

The company has also previously gained LEP funding towards new machinery, which allowed it to become more efficient and free up staff’s time to complete other jobs and allowed the company to increase capacity.

Chris Allen, managing director, said: “The continuous support that we’ve received from the LEP over the years has really helped us and these two training courses are another boost to help the business grow.

“We recently had an audit from the Food and Drug Administration and they were incredibly complimentary in how organised and successful we were and we put this down in part to the funding that the LEP has given us.

“We take a lot of our staff on straight out of university, so the training that we are receiving is helping these new starters to be trained in our way of thinking and our way of doing things. We can also identify any potential future leaders from these new recruits, and give them a real platform to grow, which in turn makes us as a company grow.”

More than 5,000 LEP-funded training courses have been undertaken by employees region since February 2015