An interview with Jacqui Leach, Human Resources Service Unit Partner at Blue Mountains City Council, NSW.
With five years of Human Resources experience at Blue Mountains City Council along with State Government professional and financial services experience prior to this, Jacqui Leach believes a good training and development officer is in tune with business needs and outcomes.
“They must work with the organisation to cost effectively provide training and development to staff so that they can deliver the organisational outcomes effectively,” she said.
Jacqui currently provides general human resource services, including learning and development, to Council’s four business units. She is also involved with organisational strategy and policies.
She sees the key challenges facing Councils as the broad range of roles/functions Council staff provide as well as financial constraints.
“You need to be creative to be able to deliver training and development outcomes in this type of environment,” she said. “One of the real challenges I see for smaller, regional Councils is the small number of training providers based in the regions. They also have fewer staff requiring training in a particular skill, which makes organising an in house course difficult.”
Jacqui says another main issue is reluctance by many staff to undertake self paced web based learning in the Council environment.
“If this learning avenue was capitalised on by smaller regional Councils and, most importantly, their staff, it would assist in meeting many training and development needs of regional Councils,” she said.
Jacqui says that by developing partnerships with training providers in the region, many training and development challenges can be overcome. Blue Mountains City Council has developed a training partnership with Western Sydney Institute TAFE that has been in operation for five years. The partnership allows Council to deliver a range of cost effective learning and development to staff, while also providing access to TAFE’s vast library resources.
“Another solution is using regional Council forums/networks to run in house training courses and allow staff from other Councils within the region to attend,” Jacqui said. “This is something we have just started to explore with our regional forum.”
Increasing legal requirements for mandatory OH&S training in operational areas is another critical issue. This training is taking funds from other learning and development training areas that are not as essential.
“This is a significant challenge for Councils as we seek additional funding or other cost effective alternatives to deliver learning and development for these skill need areas,” Jacqui said. “There will need to be a shift to more cost effective ways to deliver these skills such as coaching, mentoring, special projects, secondment and committee involvement.”
With skill shortages and an ageing workforce set to affect Local Government in the next five years, Jacqui believes Councils will need to continually look for innovative ways to meet these challenges.
