20 years of training development: The development of the ITS role and its application to a national training model

The Industrial Training Service was established in 1960 to influence ideas about training at national level and to help put them into practice. This has always been the background against which ITS in‐company work or individual training and development programmes have been conducted. The Industrial Training Service thus has been one of the links between the realities of day‐to‐day work carried out in organisations, and the thinking at national level, which guides the policies and practices of training and human resource development. This article describes how the development of the ITS over the past 20 years has paralleled the evolution of training in the UK. It describes a working model which has guided its development and uses it to make some analysis and prediction for the next 20 years.