A two-way process is needed to a)communicate T&CD offerings to the business lines across the company and b)create a conduit whereby the needs of business lines are continuously communicated to T&CD. This idea is not new and eight years ago an excellent program to produce Performance Improvement Consultants was started. Potential high fliers were selected from every business line and received six months training with the idea that they would return to their business lines and provide the expertise for them to take advantage of the latest ideas in learning and performance improvement. As things turned out, many were moved on to other important non training related tasks and their numbers shrank and the program was shelved.
Despite these difficulties, a cadre of knowledge workers is urgently needed to counsel employees at all levels on the learning and training opportunities offered by T&CD and to provide feedback to T&CD on the relevance of their programs. Potentially such a group exists, but is has been laboring under several difficulties. Spread throughout the business lines are approximately 2,000 Training Co-ordinators who, if upgraded imaginatively, are in a position to provide this urgently-needed two-way communication. However, training co-ordinators lack a job description and a job family. “Training Co-ordinator” is a role, not a job, which means that employees perfom these functions at the same time as their regular job; some employees dedicate 20% of their time to the function, some 80% 0- such is the variance. Furthermore, a Training Co-ordinator could be on any grade code between 9 and 13. Their work is largely mechanical, receiving requests from their departments or organizations to register employees in classroom courses. Most importantly, there are no training opportunities for the co-ordinators themselves. In the past ten years they have not even had a yearly “Training Co-ordinator Day”.
It is recommended that the formation of a new job family of Learning Consultants be treated as a top priority. Such Learning Consultants would be fully aware of all learning opportunities, both classroom- and technology based and would advise any employee on how best to use such opportunities to meet personal and company performance targets.
