From small acorns We know it's quite a learning curve joining Sage ( we hope it's more of a small hill than a mountain) so we have our own team of in house trainers and coaches to help them through their first steps. They deliver all sorts, from workshops to classroom based lessons, eLearning courses to one to one coaching, and everything in between. Sometimes it's just plain information you need to perform in a role. In Customer Services for instance, we support new people with 6 weeks of training, 7 weeks of coaching and follow this up with refresher courses to keep everyone up to date. After all, ' you learn something new every day', and we think it's great to share knowledge with each other. GROW ' GROW' is a one- stop training shop for technical and professional skills training. The tool has taken the pain out of finding appropriate courses and has streamlined the whole process. The service is going from strength to strength. We've worked alongside the training providers too and with a bit of creative thinking managed to negotiate up to 50% off courses in some cases – getting more for our money, and more skills for our people. Grow helped 709 people find and make the most of £ 800k worth of skills development last year. 14Sage CSR Report 08 - WorkplaceSage £ 800k Grow helped 709 people benefit from £ 800k worth of skills development in 2008 13,700 days of training and coaching were invested to develop the 194 technicians who joined us in 2008

WorkplaceSage CSR Report 08 - Workplace15 Enable Enable does exactly what it says on the tin. It enables our leaders to enable the people they manage. It's a five- day residential programme targeting individual leadership. To date, 260 people, from Team Leaders to Senior Managers have been through the Enable programme. With a further 72 expected to take part by the end of 2009, all our leaders will attend to ensure we have a consistent yet individual approach to management across our business. It's so good it's even won an award. Competing against 50 other applicants, our Enable programme was announced as winner of the Innovation award by the NE England Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development ( CIPD). We also made the final three for the Business of the Year award category. " Enable is one of the most ' people' focused courses I've ever been on – not just concentrating on how to get the best out of people, but also how to get the best out of yourself. It was confidence building, supportive and really good fun!" Inspire We think leading by example should be effortless and part of everything we do. Inspire is about just that. Building on Enable, we launched Inspire as a pilot for 2008. It's aimed at our current Executive and aspiring senior managers to develop their leadership skills, customer focus and commercial acumen. It prepares our senior leaders for the challenges they face at the very top of the ladder. 13 people benefitted from the Inspire pilot and we hope to inspire even more talent using the programme in the future. 260 of our 332 leaders have completed the Enable programme to date 88% of our people feel their manager inspires them to achieve their objectives Making sense of the road to your career Not everyone gets to attend Enable or Inspire and our people told us they'd like to be able to easily see where they fit, in Sage and how their career could develop here. We had all of the information just not in a simple format. So this year, we took our spaghetti junction of job roles and functions and transformed them into the career framework equivalent of the London Underground Map. We haven't changed the framework or re- routed any of the tracks, we just put some of our Guiding Principles into action and made it clear, concise and easy to use for everyone.