CERN HR Training pages

TEC Meeting on 22/02/2002

Participants: André Arn, Isabel Bejar-Alonso, Gerrit Jan Bossen, Enrico Chiaveri, Sudeshna Datta-Cockerill, Francois Fluckiger, Andrée Fontbonne, Erwin Mosselmans, Paula Ribeiro, Josi Schinzel, Peter Sievers, Mick Storr, Mauro Taborelli, Davide Vite, Sylvain Weisz

Excused: Margrit Burry, Francoise Fabre, Sue Foffano, Friedmann Eder, Michelle Mazerand, Linda Orr-Easo, Alberto Scaramelli, Tony Shave, Marc Tavlet, Myriam Veyrat

1. AOB and matters arising:

Mauro Taborelli inquired about the “Career Counselling interview” mentioned in the new AC26 on MAPS and he asked on how it should articulate with the preparation of the Individual Training Plan. The form and periodicity of the “Career Counselling interview” still needs to be defined, but it is certainly an opportunity to review the individual training plan while discussing career prospects. However, it is not clear that all staff will have such “Career Counselling interview” and we should proceed independently with individual training plans.

2. Feed-back from the JTB:

The agenda of the JTB meeting on February 20^th covered the follow-up of the CERN Training Plan, the impact of the budget crisis on training and the plan of action of the JTB in 2002. The subjects of divisional training plan, role of the DTO, training evaluation, organization of safety training, new courses and seminar (ELEC2002 and MAPS) were already discussed in previous TEC meetings. Most of the time was furthermore devoted to the budget situation.

HR-TD had a budget of 570 kCHF in 2001. The Group expenditure (Industrial Service contract, Technopark, Copy machines, Consumable, Books and Travel) amounted to 288 kCHF. The rest of the budget was used to “subsidize” the courses:

- Expenses engaged on pilot courses;

- Organization of courses with less students than required to balance the cost;

- Direct financing of courses (Safety Training, Academic Training, “Expensive” Technical Training).

This represented 304 kCHF in 2001 (budget overspent of 22 kCHF).

The HR-TD budget in 2002 is reduced to 440 kCHF (-23%) and it will imply a cut of ~50% on the “subsidies”. At the same time, the divisions reduce drastically their training budget and we, in HR-TD, observe a high number of cancellations and a low rate of new enrolments. It resulted, for the sole month of March, in the cancellation of 6 out of 9 scheduled courses in Management & Communication. The JTB discussed on various possibilities to react to this crisis and recommended:

- To charge the “real cost” of the courses, which means departing from the usual 200 CHF/day;

- To review the content of the Management & Communication cursus to insure that it responds to the need of the divisions. The corresponding working group will convene, under the chairmanship of Alberto Scaramelli, to update the programme.

Concerning the 2002 CERN Training Plan,

3. Discussion on training budgets in the divisions:

The TEC reviewed the situation in the divisions:

- EP: running budget has been smashed by 2/3 and travel to conferences has also been drastically reduced. There will be almost no budget for training in 2002.

- EST: the training budget is cut by 10%. About 20% of this budget was spent for the training of non-staff members, mainly for the new Autocad version: this obviously has to change in 2002.

- HR: the training budget for 2002 is of 60 kCHF, which is basically the same amount as last year.

- LHC: the division will try to maintain the principle of 1 course per person per year. Workshop that used to take place in Chamonix or Villars will be organised locally, and this corresponds to a large saving in the training budget. The hope is that the core of training for the staff will not suffer too much, but the situation regarding visitors it is not clear.

- IT: the central training budget has been cut, but it should still allow maintaining internal training at the present level. External training does not have an overall envelope, the groups pay out of their budget, and a reduction there is foreseeable.

- PS: the training budget is cut by 30% but a large part of it was used to cover the Evian workshop that will not take place in 2002. Training demand should thus stay at a level comparable to the past.

- SL: the training budget is cut by 10-15% and it means that the supervisor will need to be very selective when authorizing a course. A reduction of the demand for Management & Communication and for Language course is foreseeable, but no drastic cut. However, it is difficult to project beyond 2002 because of the restructuring of the accelerator sector. Looking 3 years ahead, as suggested for individual training plan, is certainly not possible at this time.

- SPL: the training budget is not yet defined, but the indication is that it should not decrease (it is already very low!). However, the staff has a tendency to decrease its demand.

- ST: the amount allocated per individual (Computer, travel, phone, furniture and training) was around 6kCHF and this has been cut by ~30%. However, it still allows facing training expenses when it is justified and there should not be, in principle, any impact on the demand for training from ST.

- TH: training budget is essentially zero.

4. Evolution of the Training Programmes:

Mick Storr explained that the TD group anticipated these financial problems and, to reduce the impact, the Technical Training programme proposes:

- To introduce more lectures free of charge: ELEC 2002 is an example, a course on “Web in Control Application”, given by Uli Raich (PS-BD), will be organised shortly;

- To search for in-house lecturer: Davide Vite will give a course on “Working in a Clean Room”, and DTOs can help finding good wills in the divisions;

- Bring courses on the site: we plan to organise a course on LINUX for system administrator at CERN instead of sending people to Paris. The fees would then go down from 3000 CHF per participant (not including travel and subsistence) to about 800 CHF.

The evaluation of the real cost of a course takes account of the cost of the lecturer and of the number of students. It will be made on past experience, for the courses that have already been given. In order to simplify the accounting process, it is proposed to group the costs of the different courses in bands (say 0, 100, 200, 300, 400CHF/day): a proposal will be presented at a coming TEC meeting and, if adopted, we will then decide on how to proceed with the transition.

5. Evaluation of Student’s progress in French courses:

Evaluation is an integral part of training and, in addition, the JTB has asked for a programme of evaluation to be set up in order to ensure a proper use of the resources allocated to training. On the personal level, this evaluation will demonstrate to students the progress they have made as well as identifying areas that need improvement. Two pilot sessions of tests will be organized, one in March and one in June, for the level 2 and 3 in French courses (6 classes and 70 students), greatly inspired on what is commonly done for English courses.

The tests will cover grammar, vocabulary, listening comprehension, oral expression and writing (e-mail). The scores will be compared to the mean of the class in each domain, and they will also be translated in levels, as it is presently done in English. These tests are quite different from what can be found externally since the professional and CERN-specific language part represents a large fraction of the programme. Besides, we aim at testing the students according to the need analysis performed during the placement process: the discussion indicated that supervisors or DTOs rarely participate to this analysis of the individual needs and we will have a presentation at a coming TEC meeting, with the English professors who organise the tests, of what is precisely expected at this stage.

6. Next meeting:

The next TEC meeting will take place on March 22^nd. (This meeting was cancelled and the April meeting advanced to April 12^th)

Sylvain Weisz