Staff Development - Video - Text
Staff Development
Hi I am Helen and I work with Sue and Caroline in the Staff Development Team in the office.
Our work is mainly to find out what the Consortium’s Staff and Managers need in terms of their learning development to help them to do their work better.
We then make arrangements for them to have learning opportunities at work, attend training courses or achieve the qualifications that they need.
I just want to tell you about some of the highlights of last year.
Firstly I want to tell you about qualifications for staff.
Assessors and candidates are continuing to work hard in partnership with Swansea College and good progress is being maintained.
By the end of March this year there were 64 Assessors.
We have already achieved the target for the Registered Care Homes of 50% staff and 100% managers being qualified.
We are also still on track to achieve the target set for Domiciliary Services which is 50% staff and 100% managers to be qualified by 2009. Currently 42% of our staff and 92% of our operational managers are qualified.
Staff and Managers from other departments based at the office have also been very successful this year in achieving qualifications including in Payroll, Admin and Management.
This coming year another 32 staff will start the NVQ Level 2 in Care and 18 will start at Level 3.
We also have plans for other managers to achieve Levels 4, 5 and Management Qualifications.
One of the highlights for us this year was the award ceremony which was held at the end of March.
132 people were invited along with their managers and assessors to receive a certificate, have a lunch and enjoy the congratulations from the Consortium’s management.
We all really enjoyed this occasion.
We have been aware for some time that we need to improve our practices in moving and handling and helping Service Users to move. So we commissioned a course for 1 Team Co-ordinator from each Network and myself to attend a course and become a qualified people handling and risk assessment trainer. We all attended the four days, managed to pass the assessment and the exam. We then devised the training material and set a target to do refresher training to every staff team during 2007 and so far this is going well.
Having more trainers means that now we can ensure that everybody has a refresher every year and it means that both staff and Service Users will be safer when moving.
Appraisals
Whilst starting to use the new Appraisal system and increasing the focus of Supervision on staff development we realised that we needed to expand the range of development activities for staff whilst at work.
To do this we changed the focus on some coaching.
Coaching techniques allows managers to develop their staff during work.
So we worked with a Consultant to develop a training course which most of the managers has now attended. And they have started to use these coaching approaches with their staff teams.
This course has been followed up by a series of workshops which will give support to managers while they try out the coaching.
As part of the coaching we encourage staff to complete a learning style questionnaire, this has been really interesting, it helps managers understand how to help their staff learn better and also for us as an organisation on how we deliver our training and development activities.
We will be doing more this year to help our managers to improve their coaching skills and introduce new techniques to learn such as transactional analysis.
