As a training and development worker for social care in a local authority my role includes both delivering and commissioning training. The past few years has seen a large increase in the use of practitioners delivering training to colleagues. This helps to recognise the expertise that exists within the organisation and costs a whole lot less than commissioning an external provider.
However, this has raised a whole raft of issues, including: how much support they should get; their roles and responsibilities as trainers; my department's roles and responsibilities to them, etc. It has also created a lot more work for me that isn't there when I commission external providers!
As a result I'm looking to put together a 'pathway' or 'package' or 'set of expectations' (not sure what to call it) for trainers that makes clear the support they can expect to receive, their role and responsibilites as trainer, etc.
If anybody out there has experience of implementing something similar - or has thought about doing so - then I would welcome your advice and guidance on how to move forward with this.
Many thanks in advance.
Antony Mealing
3 Responses
Test
Test
model
Hi Antony
As you’re doing it in house, I don’t have any fears of being seen as trying to sell anything to you! So – my company has a model which looks at responsibilities and support to training generally which might start some thinking around how to specifically support your training. We use it to support our own training consultancy.
It’s based on a great deal of academic research on “why training doesn’t work” and aims to tackle some of the issues which normally come up.
If you think this would be useful, email me and I’ll send it to you and can talk you through it, if you like.
Good luck
Karen
Informalise?
It sounds to me as if the approach you’re adopting is quite formal and structured, which may be why the practitioners want to know exactly where the boundaries are and how many beans make five, whereas the external providers probably already have “pret a porte” material that they can apply.
Since current thinking is that between 75-85% of workbased learning is informal, how about adopting a less formal mentoring approach instead?