Trainers at the crossroads Available to Purchase

It may be news to many trainers that in October, 1977 a report entitled An Approach to the Training of Staff with Training Officer Roles was issued by the TSA. Some of us never received copies, others may have readily filed it in the appropriate section of the archives and the rest may well have read and digested its contents. All of us have an open invitation to tender our views to the committee on trainers. However what concerns the authors is the lack of public debate on the report. After all it is now a decade since the Central Training Council published its report on the training of training officers, and the TSA is timely in suggesting we take stock of the training scene. Yet the ‘great debate’ seems to have achieved minimal proportions within industry. It is our contention that there is a serious gap between the debate being pursued at national levels by bodies such as the TSA committee on trainers and the real everyday concerns of training managers in industry. We feel that the TSA committee's invitation is to join in a debate that has already been channelled into directions remote from the issues that really matter. The central issue for trainers is the uncertainty about what their role should be and how it should relate to those other people within the concerns for which they work.