SquareOne Training: From standalone skill training to AI transformation at The Cotton Exchange
By Bruntwood SciTech
Adapting skills, adopting AI, and boosting recruitment in Liverpool
SquareOne Training provides business-to-business training across finance, manufacturing, oil and gas, technology and professional services. Led by Managing Director Lisa Johnson, the business has grown over nearly 34 years from a home-based learning provider into a European and global training partner.
The business has seen a clear shift in what employers need. Where clients once came for standalone courses such as Excel, they are now looking for broader solutions that bring together technical capability, data skills, AI and leadership. The focus has moved from learning individual tools to building teams that can adapt as technology changes.
From standalone skills to continuous learning
SquareOne Training now delivers programmes across Power BI, Microsoft 365 and AI, often combining different technologies around a particular business need.
Lisa believes this makes continuous learning increasingly important. As AI takes on more routine work, employees will need to understand how different technologies fit together and how to use the time and capacity they create more effectively.
“Over the next 24 months, people will need to master technologies like AI and understand how they fit together. AI can take on work that frees people to become better leaders, make informed decisions and spend more time on sales, marketing, strategy and business growth. Building a culture of continuous learning is vital if businesses want to keep pace.”
Lisa Johnson, Managing Director, SquareOne Training
Building confidence around AI
SquareOne is seeing first-hand what can hold businesses back from using AI effectively. Lisa identifies skills, confidence and knowing where to start as common barriers, but believes governance needs to come first.
This is particularly important for clients working with significant volumes of data or in regulated sectors such as nuclear and oil and gas. SquareOne starts with data protection, internal policies and the information an organisation is prepared to share before moving into practical applications such as prompting, automation and workflow design. This helps employees build confidence while understanding the boundaries within which the technology should be used.
Strengthening the recruitment proposition
Alongside helping clients develop their teams, SquareOne has been considering what it needs to attract and retain its own people. The move from the Wirral to Cotton Exchange in Liverpool was driven partly by Lisa’s ambition to create a better working environment.
She wanted an accessible city-centre location where employees could step away from their desks during the day, use nearby amenities and interact with people outside their immediate team. The move also made the business easier to reach for customers attending face-to-face training.
The environment has become an important part of SquareOne’s recruitment proposition. Lisa says the business was inundated with applicants for a recent vacancy following its move to Liverpool.
SquareOne Training was established about 33 years ago, starting predominantly as a small business training provider, and we've grown to be a European provider now. We train anybody from finance to manufacturing, oil, and gas—there's no particular sector that we look after, as we actually service everyone.
We started predominantly with Excel, where everything was just packages. Today, nobody wants a single package anymore; they want a business solution. What we're finding is we're not only training people in Excel, but we're training them in Power BI, AI, and leadership.
The take-up for AI was quite slow last year because generally, people were frightened to use the technology as they didn't understand the governance and didn't understand what was happening to their data. The trends have moved and people are adopting it, but they need training. The skills needed over the next 24 months will be mastering all these technologies and understanding where they fit together. It's going to free up businesses and allow them to achieve better sales, better marketing, more strategy, and business growth.
Our culture at SquareOne is to develop, learn, and inspire because we believe it's a circle of learning: develop, learn, and then you inspire others to do the same.
The reason we moved over to Liverpool and to The Cotton Exchange was all to do with accessibility for people to get to training centers a lot easier. I also wanted a place where my staff could grow and actually feel like they weren't just sitting at their desk having lunch for half an hour and then going home. I couldn't believe the welcome and the community that you got from walking through the door—I thought it was fantastic, not just from staff, but from other companies as well. Everybody talks to everybody, and everybody cares about everybody.
From coming here, we've achieved business growth through the many partnerships we've created by being in a business hub with so many local companies. I've actually noticed that I have coffees, time to talk to people, and time for meetings, whereas before, I probably just sat at my little desk and didn't move.
