Training: combined operation
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ON WEDNESDAY the new headquarters of the Road Transport Industry Training Board at Capitol House, Wembley, was officially opened by the Minister of Transport, Mrs. Barbara Castle—and many of its senior executives are already in harness devising the Board's training policy programme covering 100,000 establishments and Im employees. This follows Ministerial approval of a training levy of 1.6 per cent of payroll to provide a first year revenue of around Mint.
Despite these milestones in the development of the road transport industry, the success of future training will depend on active co-operation by employers and employees, as well as the Board's own staff, to the basic objectives of the Industrial Training Act. These are to ensure an adequate supply of properly trained men and women at all levels in industry, to secure an improvement in the quality and efficiency of industrial training and to share the cost of training more evenly between firms.
The importance of co-operation in tackling the big problem of establishing an adequate level of training in the road transport industry cannot be overstressed. Unfortunately the name "Board" tends to conjure up a bureaucratic set-up and a "weand-they" mode of thinking.
The intention
In both design and fact it is the intention of the Act that a training board should be identified with the industry it serves. The principal architect of the Act, Mr. J. G. Stewart (until recently an under-secretary at the Ministry of Labour), although himself a civil servant, admits that there is a positive advantage in the responsibility for training being placed on industry.
Therefore any success or failure in the extent to which the objectives of the Act are achieved in road transport should rightly be ascribed to the industry as a whole including its own training board, rather than to one or the other. The levy/grant scheme is intended in principle to foster company involvement in training as well as to achieve a fair distribution of training costs.
Before the Industrial Training Act there was much criticism of the situation in which some firms gave less training than necessary, knowing that they would ultimately lose trained staff to firms making no contribution to industrial training. Mr. Stewart himself is under no illusion as to the limits on the effectiveness of the levy/grant scheme in ensuring that every firm, whether it does training or not, contributes to the cost through the levy. But it is not the object of the Act to make every firm do training. The training board is not empowered to order a firm to train. Indeed, as Mr. Stewart says, if a firm is not interested in how training should be done it is probably not a good thing that it should be made to show interest because it would probably do so unenthusiastically—and poorly.
The levy/grant system in itself does not necessarily give a financial inducement to a firm to do training although a company attempting to do so will get, according to the quality and kind of training it is doing, a substantial contribution towards its cost. If it is doing more training than its "fair share" it could get back by way of grant more than it pays in levy.
So the effect of the system will be to give the compnay which is doing training a very strong incentive to do it well—because if it is going to spend money on training it will want to get something back from the levy.
But even where a company accepts the intention of the Act to improve training throughout the industry there will obviously be major problems to be resolved in devising the instrument and organization to put the objectives into effect. This applies particularly to road transport which is highly diversified.
Obviously small firms cannot contemplate the employment of a full-time training officer even though they are probably in greater need of such advice than larger companies:
Continued operations
For most small firms the success of any future training ventures must come about largely as a result of combined operations with other firms in the same area—allied to RTITB advice and support. I have already recorded examples of such co-operation at Hounslow and Inverness to indicate how the problem is being resolved in both densely and sparsely populated areas.
There are other differences in these two schemes which need consideration before similar ventures are attempted elsewhere. According to the type of training under consideration, a group training scheme can be organized on the assumption that it will have its own fully equipped training centre and provide off-the-job training. Such a scheme would readily be associated with craftsmen and technicians employed on vehicle maintenance and allied trades. But it can also apply to other types of occupation—such as the centre set up by the Construction Industry Training Board at Bircham Newton, near King's Lynn, Norfolk, for plant operators.
Less ambitious, but no less important, are the group training schemes which do not depend on having a training centre. Here I must emphasize that the intention of the Act is to provide training for all levels of employee from top management to garage floor and for many of these jobs a fully equipped training centre would be inappropriate.
Another approach to resolving the problem of providing adequate training within small firms is multi-industry—in addition to multi-firm—group training schemes. This would arise from inability to organize a one industry area group of economic size or the need to provide training for occupations which are common to many if not all industries, for example, office duties.
But whatever the circumstances, a group training scheme should provide its members with a service comparable with that provided by an efficient training department of a large operator. In so doing the members recognize that the modern planning and provision of industrial training is a specialized profession in its own rights—far removed from whatever training was achieved in the past by working alongside a skilled, but not necessarily training-conscious, operative.
Training need
A group training officer would assess the training need of individual member-firms and provide for the necessary inspection. Closely allied to training is the adequacy of a firm's methods of recruitment, selection and promotion—on which a group training officer could give valuable advice.
To achieve this the group training officer would contact further educational facilities in his area and make recommendations to his member-firms according to their needs. Because of his professional knowledge, and with the aid of training records, he could evaluate effectiveness of training as a continuing exercise bearing in mind continuous technical developments.