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The National Health Service is going through a period of rapid change in the use of information technology which has resulted in the training of NHS staff in IT skills becoming a priority. At the same time as these developments there has been a great deal of change in the further education market in England that has led to further education colleges pursuing a more market‐driven approach. As a result many colleges have been forming training partnerships with local and national employers. Reports in depth on a case study of a partnership between a hospital Trust and a college of further education to address the issue of developing and delivering information technology training to NHS staff. Concludes by highlighting the benefits and problems of this type of partnership arrangement.

Operation Vulcan is a survey of the state of the art in training for manual, craft or physical skills. This is the traditional area of training expertise: companies and countries usually take this aspect of training to a fairly advanced stage before they consider extending their in‐company training activities into other fields such as management training and clerical training. Even today in Britain, this is the only form of training in which some companies engage. When small companies assemble together in group training schemes it is usually for the purpose of pooling their efforts in craft training. Historically craft training precedes technological and technician training by several decades. Here we have, then, the traditional training area. But it is important from another point of view: it is also the biggest training area in the sense that more people are trained in manual and physical skills than in other aspects. These facts make it all the more remarkable that the training revolution in physical skills has yet to happen. We have seen a revolution taking place in management training and, to a less extent, in commercial and clerical training, but in the sphere of physical skills things tend to jog along just as they ever did. We have, it is true, seen ‘Sitting Next to Nellie’ giving way to off‐the‐job training workshops; we have the module system which enables the individual to build up his own unique personal repertoire of skills designed to meet his own needs. We have skills analysis, but this is only vaguely‐comprehended and only partially‐digested. In no way, at present, is skills analysis seen as one of the indispensable fundamentals on which skill training should be built. A great deal of existing training in this field relies on getting yourself a good syllabus and then using this as the basis for instructing by telling and demonstrating. It is almost as though the sheer ponderous dead‐weight of tradition linked with the huge scale of the problem has absorbed whatever electric shocks could be administered by the technical innovators and the reformers. And yet, all the components of a comprehensive, rational and analytical system of skill training exist at this moment. Operation Vulcan is an attempt to collect the scattered and random elements and assemble them in some co‐ordinated form.

This study explores the human resource development policies, strategies, and opportunities in 30 Kuwait corporate companies for its IT and information professionals. Questions addressed were related to induction and orientation programs; approaches for developing capabilities for change management; in‐house training policies, resources, and facilities; and policies for sending employees for training. Data were collected through structured interviews with key human resource managers of these companies. It was found that almost all the companies had intensive programs for providing systematic induction to their new employees. A majority of them had in‐house resources and facilities for training. A majority of them considered outside options for training and had developed policies for the purpose. These companies were not satisfied with the role of higher education institutions in providing useful training to their employees. Administration of training awards was biased in the favor of seniors, managers, and natives that defied the parameters of organizational needs.

The training of the training officer first came to the fore in Britain in 1965. Prior to this date there were no regular or formal provisions for training newcomers to the training profession. There were TWI courses, of course, but these were of very short duration and concentrated solely on the instructor. The Ministry of Labour ran instructor training courses at its staff college in Letchworth but these were restricted to those instructors intended for the Government Training Centres. By 1954 the staff college at Letchworth was taking on its course instructors from outside the GTC service and continued to do so from that date. All this had to do with the training of craft instructors: the trainer, covering all grades and levels of training, was not provided for.

The study aims at investigating the need for training and methods involved in information technology in the government‐owned oil industries – Nigeria National Petroleum Company (NNPC) – with particular reference to the Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company (WRPC) and the Petroleum Training Institute (PTI).

In seeking solutions to the problems raised five research questions were formulated. The population consisted of the library staff, and the method of data collection was through interview.

The results, amongst others, revealed that the commonly used training method is the internal consultancy method.

Makes modest recommendations that, if implemented, could benefit the librarians in the Nigerian oil industry from improved training, which will in turn benefit not only their users, but also the industry as a whole.

FREQUENT, INFORMAL, man‐to‐man, contact. This is the essence of the Safety Contact Scheme, recently introduced at Tanqueray Gordon & Company Limited, makers of the world famous Gordon's Gin. Under the scheme, Managers and Supervisors select a topic concerned with Safety, and make a point of discussing it either with individuals, or with two or three people from their departments. When everyone in a department has been covered, the topic is changed.

Few people would contest the statement that ‘training is an investment’. It is an investment in the future, one which it is essential for industry to undertake in order to meet the continually growing demand for skilled personnel to handle the ever increasing pace of change. Rightly, then, training as an investment is emphasised on basic training officer courses, it is the subject of many a Government exhortation and prominent businessmen go out of their way to emphasise their belief in it. It is widely publicised by the Industrial Training Boards. The slogan ‘train and gain’ was not coined by an Industrial Training Board simply to advertise the fact that they had been throwing money around as though it were going out of fashion, it was also intended to emphasise the long term gains to be made by investing in training. Looking even further back to the discussions which preceded the passing of the Industrial Training Act, one of the objectives much stressed when the levy and grant system was established was to spread the costs of this investment evenly across industry. The firms who undertook training were to be subsidised by those who benefited from it but did not undertake it. Talking and listening to training practitioners it seems axiomatic that training is an investment and equally axiomatic that, due to the inexplicable failure of management to recognise this, it is one which is in danger of being seriously neglected. To doubt what is so evidently the case is something which, in the training field, amounts to nothing less than heresy.

This paper describes the findings of an European four‐country study that attempted to pinpoint the practical impediments the small enterprises face when attempting to use information technology (IT) as an aid in their personnel training. The study was made using the Delphi technique, interviewing 120 specialists (company owners, software and IT producers, training providers) in four countries. The results suggest that most of the small companies are not yet ready to use the latest IT technologies in their personnel training, but there may be a “trickle‐down” effect from the bigger companies in some countries. The results furthermore suggest that the new IT solutions seldom deliver what they promise for the small companies. It seems that the significant impediments are the factors that the IT solutions were supposed to solve, namely freedom of time, space and pre‐described content. It seems that not many of the IT training solutions are developed with the small companies’ needs in sight, and a more close cooperation between the actors and tailoring of the IT products are often needed when planning this kind of training.

Without appropriately educating staff about new technologies and what they can do for them, businesses will go on incurring the cost of software implementation without exploiting the benefits. Tailored training solutions are almost universally offered these days, but do companies really know what they are getting? What do we mean by “tailored training” anyway? How is the content of the training determined and will it suit each of those to be trained? Key Training have pioneered the creation and development of an automated Training Needs Analysis (TNA 2000) a tool used to establish the organisational, departmental and individual objectives of those to be trained.

The article looks at the links between training and organisational effectiveness. It argues that the pressures on training are increasing, but that most training that takes place is not rigorously evaluated nor is it linked systematically into organisational goals. It argues that the competence‐based approach offers a powerful tool to link organisational goals and individual development through measurable outcomes.