Notes and news

Notes and news

Article Type: Notes and news From: Industrial and Commercial Training, Volume 46, Issue 5.

Communication in the cockpit takes to the air at Vueling

Spanish business school IESE has run a program to improve communication in the cockpit for pilots of the British Airways – Iberia low-cost airline Vueling.

The training was initiated after one of the company's captains, Fernando Val, completed the program for management development, an open-enrolment program offered by the school. Shortly afterwards he was appointed as the company's chief operating office and, enthused with his IESE experience, saw the benefit in extending it to pilots.

Fernando Val and IESE's academic co-directors for the Vueling program, Ahmad Rahnema and Hillel Maximon, were aware that between 70 and 80 percent of airline accidents result from human error and that a large proportion of this error evolved from poor communications between captain and first officer, pilots and ground crew and pilots and traffic control. Together, they saw that a program that heightened the pilots’ ability to communicate, and fundamentally that meant to listen, would be of enormous benefit.

An aviation-industry process, crew resource management (CRM), addresses human interactions to improve safety. Hillel Maximon and Fernando Val were keen to create a further level of development and experience that would add to this familiar training and further embed it.

Fernando Val, having identified the areas that he felt would be most useful for his pilots on the program, gave the IESE team free rein in designing an experience that would create a significant impact on the pilot participants. Ahmad Rahnema and Hillel Maximon brought their colleagues together at IESE and created the Taking Flight Deck Management to New Heights program that was first run with 60 participants last year.

Centered on teamwork and communication, but also including modules on decision making, successful leaders, operations management and customer satisfaction and loyalty, the first run of the program covered a wide range of topics in its three days. Participants had four sessions each day.

An essential element was an enhanced version of the Lego game – a half-day simulation where participants are asked to play different roles in order to optimize a manufacturing process using Lego pieces.

The game comprises at least two teams, each including skilled employees and managers. The simulation can show in a short time how managers’ choices and expectations can vary from those of the skilled employees and how collaborative communication between the two groups tends to lead to better outcomes.

An enhancement to the game was tried for the first time in the program. Each group had an observer to judge how well the participants communicated with each other. On conclusion of the game, each team met its observer to discuss experiences. The game ended with each team sharing observations with the group as a whole.

The program was enthusiastically embraced by the pilots, most of whom had not had similar development experience previously. Fernando Val had circulated information about the program among the pilots to see who was interested. It was hugely oversubscribed despite the fact that the pilots had to pay €1,000 each toward the costs.

Hillel Maximon is keen to further focus the program on the core communication module. He sees that there is a need running much wider than the airline sector to improve communication skills between senior technical experts and their ancillary staff. He cites surgeons with nurses, and this can be extrapolated to any other technically expert role with highly skilled and capable support staff or, as Hillel Maximon says, “people who work in hierarchical organizations and professions.”

Vueling was set up in 2004. It later merged with ClickAir, a similar business. It was bought last year by Iberia, the Spanish national carrier, itself a brand of International Airlines Group that also owns British Airways. Vueling continues to be operated as a stand-alone airline. It is the second carrier in Spain in terms of passenger numbers and the second airline in Europe for its number of flight connections.

Balfour Beatty Academy aims to improve infrastructure skills

Balfour Beatty, the international infrastructure group, is to set up a UK training academy following the award of £4.4 million through the government's “employer ownership of skills” pilot scheme.

Balfour Beatty will more than match the funding through cash and in-kind investment, with a further £9 million to be in invested in establishing the academy and new training opportunities. The focus will be on improving the skills of the company's existing workforce in construction and engineering. The training will also provide the young and unemployed with opportunities that could lead directly to jobs.

The academy will bring together all the company's current training provision under a single umbrella to offer a wider range of skills and professional qualifications. The more standardized approach will mean that these qualifications are transferable across the business and the industry.

Andrew McNaughton, Balfour Beatty chief executive, said: “As the economic upturn gathers momentum, ensuring we have a workforce that has the training and skills to enable us to lead on the global-infrastructure market remains our priority.”

We are delighted that the government recognizes that the academy approach will enable us to develop and retain some of the best qualified and most knowledgeable people in the industry. We are building a sustainable and flexible workforce that can deliver the innovation and value customers are seeking.

It also enables us to further our commitment to helping young people and the unemployed to obtain the skills that will enable them to get sustainable jobs.

Balfour Beatty is committed to giving young people and the unemployed a chance to get on the career ladder in the areas where skills are short. The academy will offer pre-employment programs to give young people and the unemployed a taste of the industry and then on to apprenticeships or jobs.

Deutsche Post DHL delivers disaster training

Deutsche Post DHL and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) held a workshop to get airports ready for disasters (Gard), at the Mactan-Cebu International Airport, in the Philippines.

The workshop prepared airport personnel for the logistics of emergencies, including handling high volumes of incoming goods and passengers in the aftermath of a disaster. The 52 participants were a mixture of staff from airport operations, air-traffic control, security and agencies that play a vital role in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

The trainers were DHL experts in the field who conducted the training on a pro-bono basis and provided relevant materials. The UNDP managed the project, led the co-ordination with local-government authorities and provided funds to meet workshop costs.

“Through these workshops, Deutsche Post DHL was able to work with authorities all over the world to analyze and define the capacities needed at airports in case of natural disasters. Most importantly, it helped all parties involved to develop a blueprint specific to each location in times of disaster,” said Christof Ehrhart, executive vice-president, corporate communications and responsibility, at Deutsche Post DHL. “Following the recent experience with typhoon Haiyan, this training equipped the Mactan-Cebu International Airport team with the right skills to manage the logistics of relief goods and other materials that will arrive at the airport following a natural catastrophe.”

“Our partnership with DHL offers us the chance to better prepare airports for the challenges associated with emergency relief,” said Jo Scheuer, UNDP's global co-ordinator for disaster-risk reduction. “In each country where we implement Gard, the workshop is part of a wide range of disaster-risk reduction measures, helping partners to prevent, mitigate and prepare for disasters.”

This was the second implementation of a Gard workshop in the Philippines after a first successful training program in Manila last year. “We live in a country located along the ring of fire, or typhoon belt, where annually approximately 80 typhoons develop above the tropical waters. We have already witnessed what the effects can be and hence want to be as prepared as possible in the event we are faced with a similar scenario in the future,” said Nigel Paul C Villarete, general manager, Mactan-Cebu International Airport.

Online learning attracts 50,000 at Veeam

A global information-technology and software company has seen more than 50,000 business partners gain online access to learning materials related to its products since installing an e-learning platform eight months ago.

At least 3,000 of those partners take courses each month and, so far, more than 10,000 of these learners have achieved professional certification through the online learning materials.

Veeam Software is based in Baar, Switzerland, with regional offices in France, the USA and Australia. The 1,200-employee company had used a mixture of self-hosted learning-management systems (LMSs), supported by its own programmers. But the company “experienced challenges” with the systems’ performance, scalability and productivity.

“We have moved all our partner-targeted global content to the Docebo LMS and are in the process of internal course migration,” explained Anton Mamichev, senior manager of Veeam's global education services. “This project brought the unexpected benefit that we were able to identify a number of outdated and unused courses in the old LMS, so this process will improve the internal education overall.”

Alessio Artuffo, the chief operating officer in north America for e-learning company Docebo, said: “In terms of functionality, we delivered everything Veeam wanted without the need for any additional development work. Veeam was able to customize, quickly and easily, the look and feel of the system to meet its branding needs.”

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 customers of food-safety company Sealed Air have gained access to learning materials through a Docebo e-learning platform and, each month, the number of customers in the system is growing.

The system provides the option to customize the materials to suit different groups of learners and so achieve tangible business goals through e-learning.

“Our industry is defined by subject-matter expertise and compliance in a global marketplace,” said Marc Robitzkat, Sealed Air's global customer and application learning leader. “It is therefore crucial for us to share the right know-how with our customers so that they can operate safely, increase their productivity and ensure operational sustainability.”

The new system has given us the opportunity to deploy a state-of-the-art learning-management solution to reach our global audiences and manage our resources centrally in a consistent manner, adding performance-cloud technology to our blended-learning approach.

Producing and distributing a range of products and services, as well as providing its customers with key industry knowledge and expertise in the field of sustainability, safety and operational compliance, Sealed Air wanted to enable its customers to benefit from a modern learning tool and to help them to use and customize their own learning materials.

Sealed Air customers can give their employees access to relevant learning materials. The system also grants certain members of these companies administrator rights yet prevents customers’ administrators from being able to see both what other Sealed Air customers are learning and how they are performing.

“Now, some months since it deployed the platform, Sealed Air produces high-quality, video-intensive learning content,” commented Alessio Artuffo. “Moreover, the platform allows Sealed Air to reuse all the old learning content that it had, and the system tracks all the users’ learning experiences.”

“Sealed Air can also use the platform to communicate with its audience on current issues of generic business and specific sector interest,” he added. “While security, safety and compliance are all key factors for Sealed Air and its customers, the company is able to certify and manage performance data, enabling it to benchmark the overall goals and performance.”

With its global headquarters in New Jersey, USA, Sealed Air employs some 25,000 people across the globe.

Lead by example is the lesson from Lloyds

Lead by example and look after the customer were the top themes when Lloyds Group chief executive António Horta-Osório took questions from a group of executive-MBA students at Cambridge Judge Business School, England.

His four-point strategy to steady the ship at Lloyds, which was reeling from the banking crisis when he joined it from Santander, comprised: build a strong new team at the top; tackle legacy issues head-on; re-establish relations with all stakeholders; and create a new strategy to take the bank forward.

This involved making difficult personnel decisions – only 40 out of the existing top 200 senior managers survived – withdrawing from operations in 30 countries and concentrating on creating a simpler and more agile presence in the UK.

One major early decision was to break ranks with the industry by committing to repaying customers mis-sold payment-protection insurance. Even though it cost shareholders, it was “the right decision for the bank and for the customers.”

The main thing that went wrong for the banks was that they lost sight of the customer and lowered their risk standards, bringing in high-return products like PPI. This had to change and banks had to go back to their roots with simple functions and a focus on the customer.

Three years after the strategy began, Lloyds is “beating its targets and getting the customers’ money back.” Customer complaints have halved in two years. Lending to small- and medium-size firms is up by 5 percent and overall growth of 3 percent has been achieved across all businesses in a declining environment. The lesson, he said, was to set a course and stick to it.

His advice for a rewarding career was to lead by example, look after the customer, work very hard, take new challenges, hire the best people with the best characters and, above all, keep learning.

Zamir Telecom connects with Oxford

Zamir Telecom, a global telecommunications company, is giving £15,000 a year for three years to Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, UK, to establish an MBA scholarship.

The gift will fund promising young people from the technology sector on the Oxford program. It is open to applicants from an emerging economy (Africa, Asia or Middle East) or to those from other countries who have an interest in technological advancement in these areas. Zamir Telecom views these regions as future hubs for innovation. The scholarship will allow individuals with intellectual and professional talent to connect with the organization in the UK and its operations in emerging economies and help them to develop and realize their potential as leaders and innovators in the sector.

In addition to the scholarship funding, Zamir Telecom will provide each scholar with a paid internship and a one-year employment contract on graduation.

Peter Tufano, dean of Saïd Business School, said: “There are many talented young people around the world and this gift will enable us to open up the opportunity for them to make connections they would otherwise never make and go on to shape the future of technology provision in the emerging economies.”

Naufal Zamir, managing director of Zamir Telecom, said, “Zamir Telecom is committed to sourcing the best talent. I firmly believe that the scholarship will unleash their intellectual creativity and advance their career development opportunities globally.”

Adhesive company seeks to make learning stick

A large manufacturer of self-adhesive products has introduced a centralized global LMS for its 3,900 employees in more than 50 countries.

Tesa Group, a fully owned affiliate of Beiersdorf AG, provides more than 6,500 industrial and professional applications and some 300 consumer products. As part of the company's learning strategy to support innovation, it wanted to provide employees across the world with a wide variety of multi-language learning programs together with the ability to enroll on all these programs flexibly. The learning content had to be kept up-to-date and easily accessible by employees, wherever they are in the world.

“There is a high level of commitment for meeting the quality standards within our organization. This drives a wide spread of training initiatives, so we must always have efficient central management of all our learning programs in place. We need to make sure that all our programs meet our high quality standards,” explained Helge Kochskämper, the company's vice-president of human resources.

To plan and steer the global training and development agenda more efficiently, we were looking for efficient documentation and reporting functionalities in our new learning-management system. In addition, our workforce consists of different generations of employees, with varying learning preferences and media use. Based on the learner preferences, we need to personalize learning paths. We also want to make learning engaging and fun.

The company will also integrate its LMS with its conference-management system, which is used for booking classrooms.

“We chose NetDimensions, as it is a truly global company. It was able to offer us a reliable and flexible solution for our innovative training and development approach,” concluded Helge Kochskämper.

Airbus trains its US team

The first group of employees who will support the production processes for assembling Airbus A320 civil airliners in Mobile, Alabama, have reported for their on-the-job-training in Hamburg, Germany.

Over coming months, the manufacturing engineers, station managers and a quality manager will work alongside their counterparts in Germany to become familiar with production tools and processes.

“We are very happy to welcome our new colleagues from Mobile to the Airbus family,” said Ulrich Weber, head of final assembly line, USA. “They have been trained in Mobile over the past two months, but now they will be able to touch the aircraft and really learn how the Airbus assembly process works.”

Hamburg is the Airbus headquarters in Germany and the home of the A320 program-management team. Structural assembly and equipping of fuselage sections and final assembly of the A318, A319, A320 and A321 take place there.

Aircraft assembly in Mobile will begin next year, with the first delivery scheduled for 2016.

Elevator company lifts employee skills

ThyssenKrupp's is building a test tower to train employees in lift technology and promote research and development.

The 244-meter tower, at Rottweil, is set to become one of the tallest structures in Germany. It will be used to test and certify elevators for middle- and high-rise buildings before and while the buildings are being constructed, thus reducing installation times. The €40 million construction will also serve as a tourist attraction.

The tower, combined with ThyssenKrupp's Neuhausen elevator-manufacturing site and the Pliezhausen research and development center, will generate a cluster of innovation in elevator technology, adding to the existing 1,500 ThyssenKrupp elevator employees in the region. An estimated 10,000 students are engaged in engineering studies at universities in the area, including Stuttgart and Konstanz in Germany and St Gallen, Zurich and Winterthur in Switzerland, thus offering an excellent recruitment base for ThyssenKrupp.

Elevator technology is evolving to cope with today's requirements for increased energy efficiency, faster travel times between floors, less-crowded lobbies and superior security in buildings. The tower will enable the testing of new solutions to meet these demands, such as shafts carrying more than one elevator cabin, and elevators capable of reaching speeds up to 18 meters per second, twice as fast as Usain Bolt's 100-meter world record.

By 2016, the global demand for elevator equipment and services is projected to rise over 5 percent annually, to €52 billion.

Students eye up Indian fashion

Designers Narendra Kumar and Azeem Khan helped students from the London Business School to learn how Indian fashion is going global.

The second-year MBA students visited Mumbai to understand how individuals and organizations are driving and adapting to change in India. The students heard how Indian culture has influenced global fashion over the ages.

The panel discussed the creative and commercial explosion in Indian fashion and predictions for trends in the industry. From the bespoke style of the maharajas, who were patrons of global luxury brands, to today's Bollywood, which is bringing trends such as the bandh gala and jodhpurs to the red carpet at international events, Indian fashion is going global. The Indian luxury consumer is evolving, the panel concluded.