TRAINING
Learning & Development Manager of the Institution of Railway Operators (IRO), Tricia Meade, talks to RTM about training opportunities, distance learning and the challenges of securing funding in the rail industry.
W
ith many key routes coming up for re-franchising, not all train opera- tors are willing to spend as much as nor- mal on training operations: they want the security of knowing they will still be run- ning services for years to come before they commit major amounts of money to train- ing staff.
Tricia Meade, learning and development manager at the Institution of Railway Operators (IRO), said this was the “big- gest challenge” that organisations focused on training face at the moment – but ex- plained how giving railway workers a fi rm grounding in all aspects of the industry can help both the employee and the employer.
She told RTM: “I think the biggest chal- lenge is obviously the training budget, with the franchise organisations. As they’re sus- ceptible to re-franchise when it gets to the end of the franchise, they obviously tend to want to not spend as much on training at that point.”
From a distance
But the IRO’s own courses are still proving very popular. The organisation provides a series of different learning programmes for students and professionals working in the rail industry to progress and develop their careers. Distance learning makes the courses easily accessible to wide range of people, who may be too busy or far away to reach training otherwise.
Meade explained: “We offer three levels, at certifi cate diploma and bachelor of science degree. That’s in railway operations man- agement. The course has been running now since 2005, and we’re due to start another course in October of this year.
“What’s happening now is that the quali- fi cation is getting to be recognised in the industry, so we are fi nding our numbers, year on year, are increasing, in terms of the students coming through.
“It’s been exceptionally successful, and we fi nd we’re getting more and more students each year, we’re expecting in the region of about another 100 students coming through in October to start the courses with us. We’ve seen an increase over the last fi ve years, from the 70s to last year, when we
64 | rail technology magazine Aug/Sep 11
had 101 students, which is our biggest in- take ever on the programme.”
The continuous development scheme al- lows members to chart their professional progress, managing their skills and knowl- edge to support their on-going career. Meade described how they have been tri- alling the programme: “That’s something that we’ve piloted for the last 12 months now in the South East area; we offer the students a chance to enrol with us on the CPD scheme, and they collect evidence of what they’ve done in terms of on-the-job training or any of the area events that we have that they’ve been attending. Once they’ve done that, they can give us a portfo- lio of evidence, and we can look at that and see whether it would justify an upgrade for them for their membership level with us.”
The trial is set to be rolled out to differ- ent areas next year, pending its successful evaluation. Meade said: “We were giving it a trial for the fi rst 12 months, in our biggest areas. We’ve trialled it in the South East and the intention is that we will roll it out to the rest of the UK and Ireland once it’s been established and once we’re past any teething problems we’ve had with it.
“Attached to that, we’ve got a mentoring initiative, which again has been piloted in the South East area, and with that we have a set list of mentors. They are quite distinguished professionals in the industry, and we pair them up with mentees, so they need to be able to talk through career de- velopment and other issues.”
One size does not fi t all
The IRO also offers bespoke training cre- ated for individual companies, to develop the principles and practices of operational planning.
“At the moment we’ve got a short course offering this,” Meade told us, “but we are looking to grow that in the very near fu- ture. We’re going to hold an operational planning principles and practices weekend. We held one in May and we’ve got another one due to start in November, and that’s a weekend course. It’s proved very popular; for the fi rst time we’re actually running two this year. With the student numbers being greater there’s a demand for it, and so we’re
running an additional course this year.
“The other offering we’ve got is back- ground for the railway industry, aimed at anybody new to the industry. That’s an in- duction programme for how the industry works, aimed at people without any prior railway knowledge: it just gives them a lot of background on how the industry works. That was originally done with Transport Scotland, but we have delivered it to other organisations as well.”
Funding the future
Despite the pressure on budgets and de- mand from on high for cost reduction, railway businesses are still funding their employees’ training with the IRO, in most cases.
Meade said: “We’re fi nding now as well be- cause they’re getting really popular, we’re getting more and more students that want to come through on the programme, and in the main they are actually funded by their organisation.
“But it’s a limited pot of money, and stu- dents have to be selected to actually attend the course. If not, we fi nd they are actu- ally self-funding, paying for the courses themselves, which can be quite hard. So we’ve tried to introduce a fl exible payment scheme to make that easier for those peo- ple paying for themselves.”
Meade found that another way in which training can reach more people is to use distance learning. “One of the big chal- lenges is time away from the day job for the people training. The distance learning programme training is all done in the stu- dent’s own time; there isn’t any classroom attendance that’s compulsory. We do tuto- rial days at the start of each of the units, but the students don’t have to attend, but they do get the chance to meet with other stu- dents, so they do get quite a lot of learning and social networking out of that day. But if the day job doesn’t release them, it’s not imperative that they attend them. They’ve got the option, but it’s not about infringing on their day job in any way,” she said.
Industry-wide The IRO aims to be recognised all over the
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