4.1 Introducing Guidance

Guidance, an internationally successful company based in the English midlands, was founded in 1991 as a technology consultancy business.

Since then, it’s grown into a technology product business, making navigational positioning equipment for a range of marine and industrial uses.

The company is based here in Leicester, both with its headquarters, its manufacturing facilities, but we also have an innovation centre here in Leicester, where a lot of the research and development is being done, and we have a small group working out of Oxford, a small group working in Hitchin, and we’ve recently established our first overseas office in Brazil.

The company sells typically globally. All our customers are globally distributed from Australia all the way to the Americas or Japan, and we serve a wide variety of vessel owners, oil companies, shipyards in our marine division, as well as, er, a range of industries, whether it is car manufacturing, paper industries, food-processing industries, with our automation products for factories.

The workforce is drawn from one of Britain’s most culturally diverse cities.

Guidance has grown quite quickly over the last ten years. At the moment, we have a headcount of around 105, mainly full-time people. We’re very culturally diverse, reflecting both Leicester with its population, but also reflecting the recruitment we’ve done recently, in particular in the R&D division, where we have a lot of qualified PhD-level employees coming from Spain, Italy, and also further afield, Poland, all the way to China.

We’re also very strongly connected to universities, and they have a very, very international student community reflecting the diversity in the UK, so it is quite natural that we’d get a lot of applicants from those sort of backgrounds. Also, it’s word of mouth. Once people have been here for a while, they know their mates back in Italy or Spain, um, they’re telling them about career opportunities and then we do get a couple of referrals that way, and therefore, our recruitment has recently been taking in more and more people from outside the United Kingdom.