TEC Meeting on 24/05/2002

Participants: André Arn, Isabel Bejar-Alonso, Margrit Burry, Sudeshna Datta-Cockerill, Francois Fluckiger, Sue Foffano, Erwin Mosselmans, Mick Storr, Mauro Taborelli, Davide Vite, Marc Tavlet, Sylvain Weisz

Excused: Enrico Chiaveri, Friedmann Eder, Andrée Fontbonne, Michelle Mazerand, Linda Orr-Easo, Paula Ribeiro, Alberto Scaramelli, Josi Schinzel, Tony Shave, Peter Sievers, Myriam Veyrat

1.        AOB and matters arising:

          Sue Foffano inquired about the status of the working group on Individual Training Plan. Sylvain Weisz replied that the project must be pursued, and that it would be the right time to convene a meeting of the working group, now that the MAPS exercise is completed. 

2.        Overview of the Technical Training Programme:

               Mick Storr gave a few statistics concerning technical training since the beginning of the year: the revalidation of the pre-2002 request lead to very few cancellation (~20) and more than 80 sessions have been organised during the first 6 months of 2002, for about 700 persons. A large fraction of the courses (60) are new or have a new format (see the attached presentation for the list of new courses). The impact of the budget crisis is limited and the search for in-house teachers is quite successful, which allows many courses to be free. The format of the technical training seminars, mixing the presentation of a new product with an academic introduction to its underlying technique, is also new and attracts a large audience.

               New courses are in preparation for he second half of the year, to be given by people at CERN (i.e. for free) and archived: FEED 2002 on close loop feed back systems (including a part on Analogue/Digital conversion) and DISP 2002 on digital signal processing. More are under investigation for next year, in particular ACCELERATOR 2003 that aim at a synthesis of the AT course of Ted Wilson with part of the CAS course and with the PS course for operators.

                David Bourillot is a Technical Student working on a Web questionnaire aiming at providing a user-friendly evaluation tools: ex. happy sheet, acquired knowledge assessment, pre-course evaluation, etc. It will be used for a prototype of a Web-based safety course that users could follow from their home institutions, with a view to provide access as soon as they arrive on the site.

                The new “transparent” cost charging, as requested by the JTB, should be introduced this fall, but the precise mechanism to reflect cost variations is not yet finalised. The simplest way is to define a scale (3 to 4 levels) that would somehow quantify the costs of the courses rather than represent their exact costs.

                Mick Storr also mentioned several pending issues regarding technical training:

-         Training of IS personnel rises difficulties and is time consuming at registration, authorisation and payment levels. Besides, the communication with people concerned is always difficult;

-         The administration of safety training is an additional workload that requires extra manpower;

-         The training administration tools are under investigation: HRT is excellent but CTA has severe limitations and does not meet requirements;

-         Web archiving is manpower intensive and the service cannot be guaranteed.

The HR-TD Technical Training team is presently doing a SWOT analysis of its activities and resources to address these topics and improve the service (Organisation of the Training Centre, Communication with students/supervisors/DTO and Service Charter). 

               Francois Fluckiger made an “official” intervention to express the satisfaction of the IT division about the service level of the technical training programme. 

3.        Support for External Training in view to obtain a diploma or a certification:

               Isabel Bejar-Alonso presented the status of the procedure and asked for feedback from the TEC (document available in EDMS at http://edms.cern.ch/document/335171/1.0 ).

The procedure is commonly agreed but some DTO were not convinced about the tools proposed to store and retrieve information. It would be better to use a common database to store all training information and a common tool to access it: this is presently the HR database and EDH for internal training. It is now proposed to use EDMS to store the information concerning external training support: although it is a CERN standard, its use is not yet widespread and the retrieval of information is felt as being tedious. Isabel argued that EDH is designed to accept requests following a hierarchical path and does not allow for iterations, any modification to a request needs to re-submit the demand from the beginning. There is also little space for comments, and the HR database is not designed to store them.

               Francois Fluckiger raised the issue of confidentiality of the data concerning divisional support for external training. The procedure proposed foresees to store the demands and their outcomes with a view to provide a reference database to the DTOs. The name of the person concerned must not appear, but the division would be easy to identify: we have to check if the division leaders agree to let all DTOs know about their decision concerning support allocation for external training. This is clearly a question for the JTB.

4.        Training policy for personnel on Industrial Support:

               As there was little time left, this topic was not discussed during the meeting. Sylvain Weisz received responses concerning training support for IS personnel from AS, EP, EST, HR, PS and SPL. When training is related to CERN specific tools (Ex: EDH, BHT, EDMS, etc.), the divisions pay for both training time and training fees. However, in most of the other cases, the divisions pay the personnel during training time, but the fees are charged to the employers. Both HR and SPL made the comment that the employer has the responsibility to train its staff and that they are already paid for that: CERN thus pays twice for training time, however it was found almost impossible to enforce the external companies to participate to both training time and training fees since the demand usually comes from the CERN side.

5.        Next meeting:

The next TEC meeting will take place on July 2^nd (change of day to allow for a BBQ lunch).

                                                                                                                Sylvain Weisz