Merseytravel embraces Skills for Life in the workplace

High profile public service provider Merseytravel is currently three years into a five year Skills for Life training plan and its positive impact is already apparent.

Merseyside Passenger Transport Authority and Executive, Merseytravel, is currently three years into a five-year Skills for Life training plan and its positive impact is already apparent.

Merseytravel’s basic skills programme, Merseylearn, has been a huge success with results so far including improvement in staff retention, an increased return on its training budget and a cultural change where personal development is a key goal of employees.

As a high profile public service provider co-ordinating an extensive travel network across the region Merseytravel is under constant pressure in terms of punctuality, accuracy, value for money and performance.

Having already recognised a basic skills issue that permeated across all levels of the organisation, Merseytravel could also see the direct effect this had on quality and efficiency.

Councillor Mark Dowd, Chair of Merseytravel, said: “Concerns had been raised about the low number of people completing training schemes and the fact that not enough people were developing within the company to take up more senior positions.

“Our main aim was to facilitate the learning of all employees enabling Merseytravel as an organisation to develop and grow.”

Merseytravel appointed Learning and Development Officer Liz Chandler to develop a strategy to meet and deliver this aim.

At this time, a national MORI poll was conducted to quantify the financial cost of errors due to basic skill issues. The poll calculated that an organisation of Merseytravel’s size, would be losing around half a million a year, if it didn’t deal with its Skills for Life issues.

Merseytravel went on to conduct further research and began to rollout a two-year engagement strategy for its new in-house training programme Merseylearn.

It enlisted the help of the trade union and TUC learning services and discovered that there was a wide range of basic skill needs that may have been impacting on individual job performance.

The problem Merseytravel now faced was how to obtain the backing from the rest of the organisation. “It definitely helped having the CEO and PTA right behind the programme,” says Liz

“Training union representatives in the benefits of a core skills development programme was also a vital factor in the successful engagement of employees.”

This, together with regular site visits, emails to staff, informal taster sessions, the prospect of progression and promotion and the delivery of training on-site in a comfortable environment helped to gain buy-in from the rest of the workforce.