Hi all

I work for a large RTO and manage a team of training developers who design and develop courses for our organisation (over 300 different courses).  These courses utilise a large number of competencies, qualifications and accredited courses from approximately 12-15 different Training Packages.  This, coupled with a large staff turnover, has my team constantly overworked trying to develop new training, manage updates to current training (driven by both the industry and the organisation), while still producing quality training and assessment based on continuous improvement principles; and sound analysis and evaluation of the workplace requirement.

I’m currently investigating how many staff I require, and I was hoping that similar studies may have been done by other large RTOs experiencing the same difficulty.

Any information that may assist me in my plight would be greatly appreciated.

Leigh,

Hi. Over the past 18 or so years I have had a great deal to do with training in the Army. As you'd be aware Army has several hundred courses on its registration and literally thousands of trainers.

Our experience has been that you need good policies and doctrine to shape the way training is used to achieve corporate objectives (and in some cases actually shape those objectives). From this comes the means for designing and developing training, conducting and for evaluating the way the outcomes of training.

What exactly are the issues you're facing?

Phil 

Phil Rutherford Ph.D Web: www.3gpm.com/drphilrutherford Blog: www.typepad.theotherdrphil.com

Phil,

Thx for your reply. Your experience sounds invaluable.  Firstly, I am confident that our policies and proedures are sound.  As far as changing policy/doctrine goes, well, that is the start of my dilemma.  

Specifically, I need more staff; and I need to be able to justify this by way of this internal reveiw that I am undertaking.  The issues I face are the variables within each course that make it difficult to estimate the time taken to maintain, design and develop our training eg, stability of the course wrt changing policies (both industry and organisational), the number of accredited UOCs contained within the course, the number of stakeholders required to be involved in the endorsement of any changes, the complexity (technical vs non-technical), the risk associated with the course (ie, how important is this course in relation to achieving organisational goals). 

To say I need 'x number' of staff to maintain, design and develop a course/curriculum hour is not a true indication of the staff effort required.  While I don't expect to be able to state explicitly the staff required as a result of my review, I do need to take this concept further to gauage a level of the extent of course differences and a range of time that is needed to maintain, evalaute and amend (or even develop a new course) to strengthen my case for the employment of more staff in my area.

So there, you have it - I'm in for a challenge :-)

Leigh

Leigh,

Good luck. It is one of those "How long is a piece of string . . . ?" exercises and I wish you well. As I'm sure you've already figured out, you will have peaks and troughs and it may be you're going to need short term contractors at one stage and full time staff at another.

Of course a maintenance schedule is going to determine when many of these peaks and troughs are going to occur. However, in your position I would want these peaks a little more level and the troughs not so deep so that all of the course repair and upgrade isn't required at the same time, but this gets us back to the question of how many staff are going to be needed at any one time.

On top of that you have the quality of staff to worry about - are they sufficiently competent to do all of the work without too much fuss and angst. The last thing you need is to be going back over and re-doing poor work.

Like you I would be interested in seeing the solution :-).

Phil

Phil Rutherford Ph.D Web: www.3gpm.com/drphilrutherford Blog: www.typepad.theotherdrphil.com

Phil

Thx.  It might be a while coming, but I'll be sure to post my reveiw on this site.

Leigh