The Challenge

An organisation with a large maintenance and engineering division, with four distinct and independent maintenance disciplines, had been through a process whereby there had been an enormous reduction in the number of skilled and authorised staff. Their skills base was to be replaced with the introduction of new equipment that had advanced reliability and built-in test equipment (BITE) capability and through vendor support that was part of the supply contract.

Recruitment had already been minimal for a number of years and support services had been contracted out leading to fewer opportunities for rotation between support and operational assets.

However, having disbanded some of the functions and jobs, there was a delay before the new sophisticated equipment capability could be introduced, which meant that in the short term (1 to 3 years) there was an expanding void of suitably trained/experienced maintenance engineers within the organisation. This meant that there was now a problem with the variation in the level of skills, knowledge and experience in staff between assets, groups and disciplines and a reduction in the overall depth of engineering required. However, some specialists were still required.

 

What we did

Advice

The advice given was to:

• use suitable, existing staff (by experience and skills) and provide them with a suitable training programme to train them to become multi-skilled in the different disciplines.

Solutions

• Developed a master jobs matrix
• Updated the existing, competency matrix to determine suitable ?cross-over' tasks that would allow individuals to be trained outside their disciplines
• Used the HR learning database to determine numbers (worldwide) of maintenance staff who had the skills and experience deemed suitable for the initial push towards multi-skilling
• Designed flexible training programmes that would:
  • allow inter-disciplinary cross training.
  • re-align the skills, knowledge and experience for selected personnel (all other personnel could then apply after initial ?bow wave' of compulsory training)
  • cover all required functions/tasks (globally) to complete the competency matrix
  • support the estimated future demands on the maintenance engineer requirement to be announced by strategic management.
• Carried out a full training needs analysis for all tasks within current jobs.

Implementation

• Training delivered over a 3 year period.
• An ongoing training needs analysis for future tasks based on emerging techniques and equipment. All new tasks would be matched to jobs and level of skills, knowledge and experience.