Employment and training initiatives
Carlisle City Council’s training activities
We believe that it is important to give staff the skills to be
able to carry out their job and to provide opportunities to develop
their career. Our training and development activities for our
staff include a range of activities designed to do this.
Appraisal - each year every employee has an
appraisal with their manager to discuss what training is best for
them.
Internal vacancies and secondments – all
vacancies and secondment opportunities are advertised to give staff
an opportunity to broaden their experience.
Development courses – the Council’s City First
programme for its staff contains modules on a number of management
and personal development areas and is open to all employees. The
programme also includes a number of essential management skills
such as interviewing and selection and appraisal.
Essential training – there are a number of
subjects that we believe are so essential to work in the Council
that we expect all employees to attend. Examples of these
include:
- Induction
- Computer skills (appropriate to each job)
- Lifting and handling
- Health and safety as it affects individual jobs
- Data Protection & Freedom of Information Act
Professional qualifications – where practical
employees are encouraged to gain externally recognised
qualifications that would benefit them in their current or future
jobs. These can range from a basic CLAIT (Computer Literacy And
Information Technology), first aid certificates, NVQs of various
levels to vocational degrees and other professional
qualifications.
Keeping up to date – we all need to keep our
skills and knowledge up to date and the Council’s training
activities cover this. It can be through internal courses, reading,
learning from an employee who has this knowledge or attending
external ‘update’ type of courses, especially in those professions
where the person is expected to have a specified amount of
professional updating each year.
Skills for life – this supports the government
initiative to raise levels of literacy and numeracy amongst those
adults that do not have a basic qualification in these skills. We
have adopted innovated ways of doing this. One real success is that
some of our staff improved their literacy and numeracy through
using computers. We were the first Council in the north west to
achieve the ‘Go Award’ (an award given to organisations who
achieve excellence in the Skills for Life initiative.