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How to share training services with other organisations

Tough times call for quick thinking. How you provide training is no exception. So here’s a sensible way to make money go further


Making your training budgets stretch has never been more important.

One vastly underused – yet obvious way - way is to share your training services. It’s not straightforward and there’s a lot to think about, but it’s increasingly popular.

This is what the The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy says:

“Shared services are frequently mentioned as a way of reducing costs – they account for a major percentage of [the] plan for public sector efficiencies and many local authorities see them as a way of keeping future Council Tax increases down to a minimum. A report in late 2005 estimated the UK public sector could save up to £40bn over the next ten years if best practice shared services were established for HR [which includes training] and Finance.”
- Shared Services – The Opportunities and Issues for Public Sector Organisations

Reviews and reports like Gershon, Lyons and Beecham also point to the potential of sharing support functions like training and staff development.

But where do you start?  

You must identify which areas of learning and development can be shared

Not all workshops can or should be shared. You must be able to recognise which areas are most likely to give the maximum return on joint investment. You need to identify which areas are common to partners and which are only relevant to one organisation.

A skill may only be relevant to a single organisation. A local authority may have a need for IT training that can be shared with the regional police force and Fire Service, but each organisation will also have a training need for that is only appropriate to its service and cannot be shared.
 
Then you must set up and manage the shared training

You need to understand any training requirement and agree which elements can be ‘shared’. The more that can be shared the better the return on the investment and the greater the benefits.

A Service Level agreement needs to be set up - one that covers everybody’s needs and under which the training provider can operate.

You must also think about other ‘compatibilities’ between client organisations - such as whether IT systems need to be similar.

Finally you have to know how to evaluate the impact of a shared training service.

With different organisations involved how do you know a shared approach provides any advantages over any other way to provide training services?
When you evaluate shared services, many complex problems arise that do not when evaluating a single training provider. There are the sheer logistics of coping with many organizations and how you assess the partners’ contributions.
You have to know what to measure and how to establish how much each partner contributes.
This workshop covers all these key points plus:

Your tutor

Your tutor for the day is Tom Holden, a published author on the subject of Training Needs Analysis, who has 20 years experience in human resources, learning and development.

Tom has worked with a huge and varied range of clients, including the Home Office, The Metropolitan Police, Marks and Spencer and many other organisations. So he has the breadth of experience you need.



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