Overview
It’s important that we offer suitable training
opportunities to our employees to enable them to improve
their performance and prepare for future roles. The
principles underlying our training and development
programme, and the support we provide, are contained
within our training and development policy.
Our main aims are to:
-
Develop employees to meet
the Company’s current and future needs within
the appropriate business and cost constraints
-
Encourage employees to
undertake professional development through internal
and external means, which will be of benefit both to
themselves and to their role within the Company. Our
Lifelong Learning Centre provides a range of
materials from language tapes to computer skills
courses
-
Make training and
development available to all employees irrespective
of age, race, gender, disability or any other
discriminatory factors in line with our Equal
Opportunities Policy
-
Where possible, promote
from within the organisation
-
Maintain and act upon the
Personal Development Plan created for employees
through the Performance Management framework.
Training and Development: Progress in 2006
Key areas of improvement during 2006 included the following:
-
Introducing management
capabilities that support our four Values, as well
as redeveloping our Management Development programme
to support skills improvement in these capabilities.
The Values were incorporated into employees’
annual performance reviews
-
Rolling out Customer
Experience workshops to employees and redeveloping
all our customer service training to support
Customer Experience, including basic Maths and
English (see ‘Our Customers’)
-
Supporting the introduction
of a new approach to recruitment by retraining and
signing off all managers who recruit core service
roles
-
Improving our feedback on
learning and developing at work and career
progression opportunities from the employee
survey
-
Launching the Learning
Management System in January 2007 to provide an
integrated platform for all learning activity
-
Including financial
literacy training in inductions from December 2006,
with the training due to be rolled out to all
employees during 2007
-
Working to improve the
skills of our managers in performance management and
coaching, with the success of this initiative being
evident in the employee survey
-
Setting up a Joint Learning
Committee with Amicus.
Overall, we delivered 30% more training in 2006 as we
continue to evolve our approach to learning and provide
more flexibility for our people. We also won two
national training awards.
