New model trainers

For too long training has been the Cinderella of HR, but that is set to
change. We profile some training and development directors who are showing they
can add value and credibility to their organisations. Nic Paton reports

As training and development practitioners sit down to discuss the latest
developments in their profession at this week’s CIPD event they may well be
pondering some recent statistics.

A CIPD study published in March shows a substantial gap between training
‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Employees working in smaller businesses, part-timers
and those with fewer educational qualifications are less likely to receive
training than those in large companies or the public sector.

At the same time, the Industrial Society has found that, where proper coaching
and mentoring of senior staff is carried out, most companies fail to evaluate
the results and do not have a coaching strategy or policy in place.

And, despite the hype and excitement caused by the arrival of e-learning,
coaching and mentoring, face-to-face learning and on-the-job training remain by
far the most popular methods, says the CIPD.

How, then, should training and development professionals respond? Training
has often been looked down on by managers as a cost that has to be tolerated
and that, in harsher economic times, can be swiftly cut back upon. Similarly, a
common complaint among training and development professionals is that they are
undervalued, under-paid in relation to their HR colleagues and under-recognised
for the value they bring to a business.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, argues Martyn Sloman, adviser on
training and development at the CIPD, who has been involved with the profession
since 1985. "In the past, training and development has not been an
exciting profession – it has often been considered a bit of a career
dead-end," he agrees. "But we now have a unique window of opportunity
to create new credibility and value."

In Sloman’s view there are two current pressures at work that have the
potential to move training and development up the agenda, if practitioners are
willing to grasp the opportunity.

First, there is more emphasis than there has been on people as a resource
being a key driver of competitiveness. "Developing and managing people is
arguably the only source of competitive advantage left to many companies,"
says Sloman.

The second pressure is the emergence of new technology, particularly
e-learning and other training platforms. These have radically changed the way
organisations can deliver and perceive training, says Sloman, offering cheaper,
more accessible, more flexible learning.

Yet there is also a danger of businesses and trainers being blinded by the
technology and spending a fortune on something inappropriate. This is
particularly the case where organisations may have rushed in and bought
generic, off-the-shelf e-learning packages, he suggests.

"In the past it was true that, as a trainer, you could just scoot
along. Now it is about anticipating demands and being able to speak to the
management. Trainers are also required to be less technical and
jargon-free," he says.

As is apparent, both from Sloman and the training and development directors
profiled below, trainers are reporting a significant shift in attitude towards
learning. The paternalistic approach – with training delivered centrally to the
classroom and workers simply taking the medicine – is giving way to a sense
that learners must take at least some responsibility for their learning.

Programmes that encourage staff to sit down and work out what it is they
want, or need, to learn, rather than letting their line manager spoon-feed
them, are becoming more common.

"It is a shift to a model centred around the learner," says
Sloman. "We are having to find out a huge amount about how people learn."

Similarly, successful training and development directors appear to have one
thing in common – a sharp and overriding sense of their organisation’s business
strategy and where training and development fits into that mix.

As Amber Moore, national training and development manager at law firm DLA,
and a speaker at HRD 2002, puts it: "Training and development managers
have got to be chameleons. You have to adapt your personal style to match the
individual’s. You have to be a sales person, financier and diplomat. But most
of all you have to link your strategy to the business.

"If you want to be seen as one of the most important parts of the
business, then you need to get out there and make sure you deliver."

Alison Winch
Director of learning and development, Interbrew

Good training and development practitioners, argues Alison Winch, director
of learning and development at Interbrew, need to have a real openness and an
ability to connect with the business and those within it.

"Often when a person comes to you who is struggling with their team,
they have done everything they can to make it work. To come to you, with all
the politics that might entail, takes quite a lot," she says.

Belgian-owned Interbrew is one of the world’s oldest beer companies and is
most famous for its Stella Artois brand. It has a presence in 17 countries and
in the UK the business is split into eight areas: head office; marketing;
selling to pubs, bars and hotels; selling to off-licences and supermarkets;
customer services; call centres; servicing; and logistics. In the UKthe company
employs some 5,000 people at 20 sites, including around 1,000 managers.

Winch, 39, has been director of learning and development since 1998, having
worked at Whitbread, Marriott and Travel Inn. She was also HR director at TGI
Fridays for seven years and recently completed a masters degree in learning and
development.

While reluctant to divulge a figure, she describes herself as "very
well paid", adding: "My performance is very much linked to company
profitability. More than 40 per cent of my salary is on bonus."

There is a small central learning and development team, consisting of her
plus two others. This is complemented by teams in each business unit focusing
on technical training needs, such as brewing and supply chain management,
forklift truck driving and so on.

The main challenge, she says, "is putting people in a room, having a
conversation with them and taking them somewhere new – getting people to buy
into something, before they know what it is".

For instance, two years ago Winch began developing an innovative nine-month
management action learning programme that saw candidates choosing what they
wanted to learn and being coached and evaluated by senior people throughout.
The first 11 people from this scheme graduated last month.

"The board had to take a blind leap of faith. We were talking about
something they did not understand and would not understand until they had
completed it."

Nevertheless, there are problems to contend with. Winch cites impatience at
getting people to understand where she wants to take them, and people not
moving as fast as she would like.

Another barrier, ironically, is when a business is successful. A sense of ‘if
it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ can be hard to change even if it is obvious that
changes need to be made for that success to be sustained.

She adds: "I am a woman in a very male-orientated business. There are
women in the middle manager ranks, but certainly at senior level there is only
me. So when you are trying to bring in something different, and you are
different, it is easier to be rejected. I have had to work hard to get beyond
that and I feel I have done that."

Despite this, she says Interbrew is the kind of company where, if you know
what you want to do and how to do it, you can do anything you want – and since
January, she has been running leadership courses for managers using horses, a
concept she has worked on for the past five years.

Candidates are tasked to lead a horse around an arena without using ropes,
bridles or other control devices, for example. "It really shows people up.
They have to find something within themselves that will make the horse follow
them," she says. So far, about 25 managers have been through it, with 75
lined up.

Winch has started a doctorate in equine-based coaching and hopes to strike
out as a leadership guru in the future, promoting the idea of training with
horses.

"I engage my whole self in it – this is my purpose, my passion, my
life. The only downside, is asking ‘why am I forcing myself through this?’ when
you are trying to lead people through a new thing. The worst part is what we
face in ourselves."

"What I am most proud of is that learning and development at Interbrew
has changed from being something you did on a wet weekend in January to
something that is integral to what people want."

Alison Winch is speaking at the HRD seminar: How e-learners learn.
Tuesday 16 April (a5) 11.00-12.15

Bob Nelson
Controller of training and development, BBC

With 350 staff in seven locations, a
turnover of £40m and some 28,000 employees to train, Bob Nelson’s role is about
as big as it gets for a training and development specialist. Nelson, 52, is
controller of development and training at the BBC, now one of the world’s
largest trainers in audio and visual skills.

As well as meeting internal training needs, Nelson and his team
operate training schools overseas and run skills development courses for many
charitable organisations around the world.

Nelson has been with the corporation for 14 years, five of them
as controller. In March this year, he was awarded a lifetime achievement award
by Skillset, the best practice training body. His salary, between £120,000 and
£140,000, reflects the prominence of his role at the organisation.

"It is a long time since I have stood up and run a
training course, to be honest. My role is mostly about strategy, leadership,
budgeting and setting out staff and finance issues. It’s about working out how
to get the money for the things we need to do. In many ways, it is much more of
a general manager’s role," he explains.

Nelson has a degree in politics and economics and a Masters
degree in occupational psychology. Before the BBC he worked at BA, helping to
oversee the large culture change programme put in place by then chief executive
Colin Marshall.

A good training and development specialist must be persuasive
and authoritative, he argues: "You need to cause other people to do what
you want them to do without them realising that you want them to do it. You
need to make a real connection to the business," he says. "There is
absolutely no point in turning out fantastic training if it is irrelevant to
the business."

One of the main challenges is ensuring the skills being taught
produce real competitive advantage, he argues. Being seen to be attuned to the
needs of the business may also help protect the department in a downturn.

His main headache is getting people to realise that training is
not something they should do when all other avenues have been explored.
"Training is one of those things that people put off. It is just fighting
against that."

And when an organisation such as the BBC is staffed with
intelligent, creative, independently minded people, convincing them they need
training can be tricky. "There is sometimes a sense of ‘I didn’t get where
I am today by going on a training course’," he says. The job, then, is
very much about hammering home the message that training is not a chore but
something that will actually benefit them.

Other irritants include the fact that, at this level, Nelson
often finds himself chained to his desk dealing with e-mails – he receives
about 60 a day – and other correspondence, rather than being out in the field
pushing forward the training agenda.

But there are also many highs. Nelson cites in particular one
training initiative, through the BBC’s non profit-making World Service Trust,
in India that was designed to tackle the stigma of leprosy. The team put
together an EastEnders-style soap that succeeded radically in changing people’s
perceptions.

Nelson is encouraged to develop his own skills too. Six years
ago he went on a six-week general management programme and a few weeks ago he
updated his keyboard skills. He hopes the future holds an HR director role in a
plc or a more specialised training and development role.

Managers are increasingly realising that share options, fancy
titles and bonuses can only go so far in motivating people, he argues. Training
and development, if handled well, can help drive the business too.

Soon after he started, for instance, Nelson was tasked by then
director general John Birt to, as he puts it, "pump the organisation full
of digital skills". Fine in principle, but this was before the resources
or capability to go digital were even in place. In effect, Birt was adopting a
bottom-up approach.

"We were giving people the skills before the demand was
there," he says. "But once we had put the skills in, it dragged in
the demand. We were using training to drag up demand for those skills."

Sarah
Simpson
Director, training and resources, Suzy Lamplugh Trust

It was while teaching a TEFL
(Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course in the early 1970s that Sarah
Simpson hit on what is her overriding mantra for training and development.

"I learnt that if you are talking, then your students are
not," says Simpson, director of training and resources at the Suzy
Lamplugh Trust. "If you contribute you feel more valued and you learn more
because if you are speaking you have to think about it."

Simpson, 55, started off her career in retail management before
moving into the charity field with the YMCA. She has been with the Suzy
Lamplugh Trust since 1993, founding the trust’s training department.

The trust is the national charity for personal safety, created
in the wake of the death of Suzy Lamplugh, the estate agent who disappeared
after going to meet a ‘Mr Kipper’ to view a house.

Unusually for a training director, Simpson’s responsibility is
focused less on the training needs of her staff – who are mostly administrators
– and more on external training provision. Despite being a charity, the trust
is now the UK’s largest provider of personal safety training.

The charity has more than 600 ‘tutors’ dotted around the
country, aged between 17 and 80, who have been trained by the trust but not
actually employed by it. Tutors are regularly updated and trained in the latest
personal safety information or techniques, but spend most of their time out in
the field.

There are a further 23 self-employed trainers who work with the
trust delivering training in the workplace, offering courses ranging from
between two and 10 hours. The training of tutors is carried out by other
tutors. All courses are customised to the specific needs of the organisation
being visited. Some 600 training events were held last year.

Simpson declines to reveal her salary, but does admit it is
"very low" and that her trainers generally earn more than she does,
as the trust has to remain commercially competitive to retain good trainers.

Good training and development directors need to have
creativity, flexibility, energy, enthusiasm, self-belief and, critically, an
ability to listen and be receptive to ideas, she argues.

Her main responsibilities lie in directing the future
development and training needs of trainers and tutors, dealing with conferences
and looking at where training opportunities are likely to develop.

For instance, since 11 September, many organisations have
strengthened their security. This has led to more work being carried out on how
to respond to aggression in the workplace, either from customers, passengers,
colleagues or, even security guards.

The main challenge of working in this environment is trying to
ensure the training that is delivered is backed up by the organisation.
"Staff often think they are going on a training course, but the management
is only paying lipservice to it," she says. "Unless the management is
there listening, there is a sense that things are not going to change. There
needs to be a recognition that they themselves need to change their behaviour."

People are often also unwilling to admit to incidents for fear
of being seen as unprofessional, an issue that must be addressed by the
trainer, she adds.

The trust is currently working with call centre staff helping
them manage stress caused by aggressive or hostile callers. Firms are
encouraged to set up ‘destressing’ rooms where staff can go to bash cushions
with wooden spoons or a ‘stress drawer’ full of chocolate treats. Often the
simple fact of having a separate area, signalling a recognition that stress is
a problem, helps immensely, says Simpson.

The best element of the job for Simpson is the opportunities
she sees for progress every time she steps into the office. The downside, she
adds, is achieving all the things she wants to on a limited budget.

She is particularly proud of a series of conferences she helped
organise with local education authorities for their teaching and site
supervisory staff this year.

"The value of coming in from the outside and working with
people that perhaps knew each other but had never shared their interests or
practices together was great – it was a chance for people to get recognition
from their authority," she says.

Sarah Simpson is speaking at the
HRD seminar: Dealing with aggression in the workplace. Wednesday 17 April (b8)
13.45-15.00

Elaine Moore
Training and development director, NOP Research Group

Elaine Moore has been with research
organisation NOP for the past 10 years, shifting from a research role to
training and development. She took up her current role of training and
development director four years ago. The team consists of her, one permanent IT
trainer and two training co-ordinators.

The training is split into six distinct programmes: IT, market
research, technical skills, general business skills, coaching and mentoring. Of
these, technical skills training is perceived as being the core skill employees
must have.

The company, founded in 1957, employs 600 people in the UK and
has offices in London, Oxford, Barking, Luton and Chelmsford.

Moore’s key responsibility is putting in place a targeted
programme of training and development that links closely with business needs
and objectives. "A lot of people are now much more concerned with taking a
strategic approach to training and development. Clients expect to see
improvements in efficiency and productivity all the time, and, quite rightly,
they should be able to see that in training and development too," she says.

Training at NOP is split between classroom-based study and
PC-based learning, with trainers generally working with small groups. "A
lot more of our training is interactive. There is nothing more tedious than
listening to a lot of presentations," she says. Coaching and mentoring is
done on a one-to-one basis.

A key challenge is trying to keep information and training
fresh. "How do you collect the appropriate information and disseminate it
without being bureaucratic? How do you collect histories, evidence, make it
useful and avoid endless forms?" she asks.

It certainly helps if training and development is championed at
a senior level within the organisation, something that has always been the case
at NOP. "We are beginning to move from a passive approach – where people
wait to be found a course – to a more proactive stance," she adds.

For the past nine months, for instance, NOP has been testing
the viability of making coaching courses for new managers in the business
research division mandatory.

The best part of the job for Moore is the fact she gets to
think strategically. "It’s about designing the next training programme so
it links to where the business is going," she explains. "It’s about
bridging the gap wherever possible."

A constant bugbear is that market researchers as a breed tend
to value their individuality and ability to think freely, meaning the delivery
of any training has to be carefully pitched so as not to create hostility.
"They can resent the notion they should be having classes in what managers
should be like. In the past we have put managers through ‘sheep-dip learning’
programmes or have given them a random array of courses and workshops that have
been incoherent, or not given them enough information," she admits candidly.

Successful learning, in this context, is therefore very much
about allowing the trainee to set their own goals and looking closely at how,
or indeed if, the learning will be remembered and applied back in the workplace.

"People find it hard to diagnose their development needs –
you often do not realise your management skills are poor. So you need to design
management development programmes that address those obstacles," she
argues.

Moore, for instance, developed and instigated a management
self-learning programme, something she is justly proud of.

Participants were asked to draw up a personal learning contract
with their line manager, setting out, through 360-degree feedback, learning.

The managers were then split into learning groups of between
six to eight people, meeting six to eight times over a nine-month period,
overseen by a group adviser. At the end of the programme, each learning group
presented what they had learnt to an audience of senior managers and board members.

As to the future, Moore sees her role as helping to push the
business forward so it is offering clients a greater range of services –
particularly more consultancy-type services rather than just dry intelligence
or statistics.

While she concedes training and development is not, and never
will be, a core business in any organisation, it is gaining ground. "The
more businesses have to cope with change, the more they need training and
development programmes. Whatever happens, training and development is going to
be increasing in importance in the workplace," she asserts.

Elaine Moore is speaking at the
HRD seminar: Developing senior managers Wednesday 17 April. (b12) 15.30-16.30

Graham
Peeke
Director of professional and organisational development, Learning and
Skills Development Agency

Training and development has often
been undervalued and is frequently one of the first things to go in times of
economic difficulty. "You have to push the economic and the business case
for it."

So says Graham Peeke, director of professional and
organisational development at the Learning and Skills Development Agency
(LSDA). He should know. A number of years back the agency, then called the
Further Education Development Agency, was strongly criticised over its
performance by the Parliamentary select committee on education.

Now, however, it has turned its reputation around within
Government circles and in the further education sector as a whole. It has a
reputation as a body that adds value when it comes to training and development
and which can put policy into practice, Peeke adds.

The agency was renamed in November 2000. It provides training
and runs conferences for further education personnel and co-ordinates research
and development projects. It is also the largest UK provider of training for
governors, managers and practitioners in the further education sector, running
residential courses, one-day courses and networking events.

Peeke, 50, spent 23 years in the further education sector,
working in colleges first as a lecturer and subsequently in a number of
management roles. He joined the LSDA in 1997, moving to his current job in 1999.

He oversees three teams covering professional development,
quality improvement and the agency’s regional directors.

Within the eight-strong professional development team, Peeke is
responsible for ensuring the delivery of programmes in areas such as
leadership, governance and management development. Courses are generally aimed
at college principals or middle managers.

The quality improvement team, of about eight full-time staff,
involves itself in large training contracts, mostly but not solely with
Government, for improving the quality of adult learning.

The agency has eight regional directors who are in contact with
colleges around the UK – a valuable source of intelligence. Training and
development issues here include working with players such as the regional
development agencies, he says.

Peeke’s role is largely one of overseeing management, budgeting
and staffing issues surrounding training and development. "There is a
leadership element to it. What are the key issues we are facing, where are we
going, are we contributing to the corporate direction of the agency?" he
says.

A major challenge, as he sees it, is that, inevitably in such a
sector, many of the projects or events that the agency is involved with are
quite high profile so that, when they do go wrong, it can be a major headache.

Another key challenge is securing contracts to make sure the
business continues to function. The agency gets a core grant of £4m from the
Government but has a turnover of £25m. It gets the rest through competitive
tendering of contracts, primarily with Government but also elsewhere.

The best part of the job for him is its variety, from
speech-making and writing to co-ordinating with other national bodies, he says.
"You have a chance in a national organisation like this to influence
policy. You are in a position to have some influence on what is going on in
different organisations throughout the sector," he explains.

When it comes to his personal training and development, the
agency holds ‘learning days’ every couple of months where staff can share best
practice and ideas, look at key problems, solutions and policy initiatives
across the agency.

There are also many informal learning opportunities, at
conferences or through meeting other organisations as well as on-the-job
learning, stresses Peeke.

He is proud of the shift in attitude he has brought about at
the agency, particularly towards professional development. Before he arrived
there was a relatively small number of training programmes in this area and the
agency had to spend a lot of time chasing customers because this part of the
operation was not centrally funded.

Now, working with the Government, the agency has repositioned
itself on how it identifies development needs. The funding has been put on a
central footing so it can be more strategic in its thinking, going direct to
organisations to address their needs. It has also worked to develop partnership
with consultancies.

"We have worked hard to reposition ourselves in the eyes
of the Government as a body that is really good at translating policy into
practice," he says.

"Investing in training and development can really benefit
business. The number of people who are only responsible for training and
development is shrinking – they are now more likely taking responsibility for
the whole HR area and quality improvement," he adds.

Ray
Campsie
Senior executive responsible for group training and management
development, HSBC

Without active and enthusiastic
support from the management executive, a training and development director
faces an almost impossible task. Ray Campsie, the senior executive responsible
for group training and management development at banking giant HSBC, counts
himself lucky for the level of support he has from senior management.

"These are people who have literally changed their diaries
to take part in training and development activities. If you do not have that
sort of support, do not bother," he says, citing the example of a recent
course where the group chairman came down to give a briefing.

HSBC spends some £90m a year on training, averaging out at
about £500 per person a year, or four to five days’ training each.

Campsie, 54, joined the bank – then the Hong Kong Bank – in
1986, having previously been head of UK management development in the water
industry. He took on his current ‘concept’, as he calls it, in 1993.

He is responsible for the overall quality and frequency of
training for HSBC’s 173,000 employees worldwide. The bank has 7,000 offices in
81 countries.

The training and development function has a core central staff
of about 20 trainers, complemented by training and development teams located in
the 15 business units. These may have as many as 400 people or as few as nine
and report directly to group training officers, with ‘a dotted line’ leading to
Campsie.

The majority of HSBC’s training is split into two areas: specialised
functional training and general management training. At this level, inevitably,
Campsie has moved on from a hands-on training role. "I do none whatsoever
– I have been banished," he jokes.

Instead, his role is largely about strategic planning. He takes
responsibility for any relevant initiatives that come down from the senior
management team and has specific responsibility for the bank’s graduate intake.
This year HSBC is expected to recruit some 250 graduates to its commercial bank
and between 70 to 100 on the investment banking side.

His is not a board-level position and he reports to the group
general manager of HR. He declines to go public on his salary, simply saying
"it is the norm" for his level in his sector.

The key challenge, he argues, is much the same as that faced by
any training and development director. "It’s about getting more with less.
More with less money and less people. It’s about trying to get a global reach
to ensure people network and communicate across their natural boundaries and
geographical functions," he says.

One of the key drivers of this process has been the war for
talent, a war that has been particularly acute in the banking sector. All the
big banks have had to take a hard look at how they retain and motivate their
staff, and training and development, as a result, has moved rapidly up the
agenda.

"The war for talent is not just about those with high
potential. You cannot just create an elite and focus on them, you still have a
responsibility for the other 99.9 per cent who run the organisation," he
explains.

In an organisation of this size, a major headache is simply
ensuring his message keeps getting home, says Campsie. Then there is the
ongoing debate about how training should be best delivered.

HSBC has taken a conscious decision not to, as Campsie puts it,
"spend bucket-loads on e-learning". Subsequently, most of the group’s
training still takes place face-to-face. There is also a debate over how much
should be bought in from outside and how much kept in-house.

Campsie himself recently attended a three-day conference in
Brussels on leadership development. Otherwise, most of his own training and
development comes from relevant journals and others in the industry.

Three years ago, HSBC launched a five-year strategy. As part of
this, Campsie helped organise a two-day worldwide seminar. "The
communication and preparation for that was fun afterwards, but not at the
time," he laughs.

More recently, he has been instrumental in putting in place a
‘collective management’ project, bringing together groups of 12 people from
functions across the world. The 12 take part in a three-day intensive
programme, including meeting a range of senior management, undertaking
projects, forming business learning groups and running simulations to emphasise
the benefits of collective working. So far more than 50 managers have been
through it.

Effective training and development, he argues, is "a
combination of coaching, counselling and consulting skills" as well as
having the vision to see what the real needs of an organisation are.

"You must either get involved in the business, or get out.
You are either a business partner or you are not. If you cannot prove
numerically or emotionally that you add value then you do not deserve to be
part of the game," he explains.

Amber
Moore
National training and development manager, DLA

Getting training and development
right is not rocket science, insists Amber Moore, national training and
development manager at law firm DLA. "The business practices and the basic
principles are the same irrespective of what sphere you are working in,"
she says.

She identifies four key elements: setting a strategy that links
in with the business, budgeting it sensibly, integrating it within the business
and, crucially, delivering on your promises.

"I think to a certain extent people in the training and
development function have to be proactive in changing perceptions of them. You
cannot afford to sit back and say I am undervalued or underpaid," she adds.

This is particularly the case in the legal profession, not a
sector known for its indulgence of under performers. But Moore, 33, has never
been one to shy away from challenges. After graduating in French and Greek
Studies from Keele, she found herself managing 300 shift workers on the
shopfloor in a manufacturing plant. "I was responsible for making sure the
work continued smoothly, because if they stopped they did not get paid,"
she laughs.

After that daunting experience, she went back to college to
learn IT skills and ended up at a company called Central Law Training, building
up the company’s legal training department.

Head hunted twice, she eventually landed at DLA in 1998, first
as training and development manager, then as national training and development
manager. She is, she adds, "very well paid for what I do" but
declines to name a figure.

Unusually for a law firm, training and development at DLA is
intrinsically intertwined with the HR function. She reports to the HR director
and is one of four national managers. Her team consists of five people: three
senior officers and two training and development officers.

Her role is to design, with the HR department, the whole
training and development strategy for the firm and implement it among DLR’s
2,616 staff, including 303 partners.

The way she has done this, she explains, is to take an holistic
approach to training and development. "Training is often seen as very much
a pill to be taken to cure an ailment. But I had a fantastic opportunity to
look at having an HR and training and development strategy that was integrated
into the business strategy."

Moore developed a curriculum-based approach. She consulted with
everyone in the practice and put together a curriculum pack for each individual
member of staff outlining their training and development needs, competencies,
and career development plans.

The biggest challenge was in changing behaviour, she argues.
"You cannot approach something like this overnight. It took a tremendous
amount of hard work, having to demonstrate on a constant basis the value of it."

The skills and management pack was launched at the end of 2000
and this May will be extended to the fee earners – the solicitors – within the
business, who up until now have only had a pack devoted to IT training.

Moore is working on developing the company’s three-year
strategy to make it one of the top five law firms in Europe. "The next
challenge is to take the model we have into Europe and make it fit the
practices there."

Unsurprisingly, she has access to the curriculum herself and,
indeed, often pilots some of the courses on offer. She is also doing a
postgraduate diploma in HR development at the University of Manchester Business
School.

For Moore, the worst part of the job is the need to constantly
be re-evaluating what she does and how she does it. "You can never afford
to sit back and relax and say that is it," she says. "It is
exhausting."

At the same time, worst can also be best. "When you are
able to deliver on something that you can actually see and make a difference,
it is hugely rewarding. When people who have been sceptical and cynical come up
to you and say ‘that really worked’, you get a real buzz," she enthuses,
adding: "Lawyers are not generally very liberal with their praise."

Amber
Moore is speaking at the HRD seminar: Learning Strategies that work. Thursday
18 April 13.45-15.00