A TWO-year-old training provider in York has landed a blockbuster Government contract worth more than £3 million.

i2i, based at the Innovation Centre at York Science Park, revealed today that it had beaten about 200 other tenderers for the three-year Jobcentre Plus task to prepare 2,000 jobless people in the North for work.

Half of them will be expected to find jobs at the end of it.

It has meant setting up eight new offices in Oldham, Rochdale, Wigan, Leigh, Bolton, Bury, Ashton and Stockport and taking on 30 new staff.

It brings to 60 the number of full-time employees on the i2i payroll, while more than 20 others are employed part-time.

The contract is also likely to benefit Aldwark Outdoor Activity Centre, near Aldwark Manor, where the firm regularly brings unemployed people for team- building activities.

It will be part of a two-week course designed by i2i to prepare jobseekers for employment, by boosting motivation and confidence levels and advising on job searches and CV creation.

The firm says people who attend the course also emerge with a qualification, such as a certificate in First Aid, Health & Safety and Nutrition and Health.

Matthew Gore, i2i s managing director, said: "We are hugely proud of what we have achieved in such a short time. It is a real endorsement of the work we have already been doing for JobCentre Plus.

"We already held a contract for the Jobcentre in Stockport, but Jobcentre Plus decided to tender for the entire region, rather than piecemeal, so we went for it."

A little more than a year after i2i was formed in June 2004 by Mr Gore and his three other York-based directors, Kent Mayall, Shaun McKenna and his brother, James Gore, the venture soared with a £475,000 contract involving Blackburn Rovers Football Club.

Called the i2i Coaching Academy, the firm used the club's Ewood Park ground as a base to get the jobless of Blackburn and Darwen back to work as part of a 27 month project financed by JobCentre Plus and the European Social fund.

Now, apart from the eight-office task, i2i has also clinched another contract at Blackburn Rovers to place ethnic minority groups into jobs.

"We keep winning these huge training deals because our passion for the mission is absolute," said Mr Gore. "The foundation of all we do is to inspire individuals to fulfill their potential.

"Too many other training organisations rely on the dry classroom' procedure of chalk and talk. This is not good enough.

"Many of our clients are people who are second and third generation unemployed, for whom joblessness is a state of mind as well as being.

"It takes innovation and excitement to wrench them out of that and show them what is needed and really can happen in the real world."