Training

BACKGROUND

Presently the section of metallurgical department that I manage is having a complement of 60 employees. Of the 60 employees, I am the only one with tertiary qualifications and three other employees with technical training qualifications (electrical, fitting and boiler making). All the other employees are not having matriculation certificate and this create a challenge on the kind of training that has to be offered to them.

The training department introduced metallurgical training modules to help employees, however, due to the technical aspects of metallurgy the modules cannot be simplified to the level of employees who have not passed ABET level 3 (English literacy). The literacy problem created a challenge because of the time an employee has to spend in training before he \ she can even start with actual training of the job.

Over the past few months the company has embarked on a new approach to encourage employees to be responsible for their own training. This is been done through multi-skilling in which one person should be able to do three jobs and three people should be able to do one job within the same working area and also through skill based pay approach in which all the skills an employee obtains shall be paid only if the skills relates to the job that employee is doing.

The training is only focused on the job been done presently and does not focus on future technological changes that we are introducing. 70% of the skills training being offered presently will be redundant with the introduction of new technology and with the emphasis that employees should take responsibility of their work area. Recruitment is being done only on senior or specialised jobs and the challenge is that employees organisation wants the company to train the existing employees to secure the jobs. This, however, creates a challenge to us managers as this limits the introduction of new processing techniques.

(i) Competency based approach to staff...