Learning and development

We talk to Amy Knight, Laundry Academy Development Manager at Christeyns, on how the firm tackles training and development, tapping into the expertise and knowledge already within the laundry team.

Amy started in her current role in 2019 following over ten years as a Technical Services Accounts Manager. This hands-on experience managing her own customer base means she has first-hand knowledge when it comes to the level of technical support needed and the issues around this provision.

Her role as Laundry Academy Development Manager is to ensure consistency in the quality and professionalism of the technical support offered by Christeyns UK Laundry team to its customers, through the coordination and provision of effective training programmes and packages.

With a large workforce spread across the country and a huge amount of skill and knowledge across the teams, it is crucial to ensure that this knowledge is not lost, passed onto new recruits and to other teams across the business. On top of this there is the constant introduction of new products, technologies and legislation changes as well as updates on health and safety. A lot to keep tabs on.

Here Amy addresses some of the key issues:

“Location is probably one of the main issues when it comes to laundry field team training. We have staff based across the country and although some topics work well over Teams or e-learning, there is a lot of training that only suits a practical or face to face approach. So, obtaining the resources to capture everyone and work around different schedules is a challenge.

“To try to combat these issues we have recently started to introduce regional training sessions, these are created specifically to meet the main requirements of each specific regional team and we are finding that these are working very well.

“We run a system called SkillStation, a competency management system where every employee has a profile and all the required competencies for their job role are built into a set of skill groups and skills.

“Each skill has its own % required competency for that persons’ job role and its own method of assessment, including multiple choice assessments, e-learning modules, line manager assessment, short answer assessments, projects, self-assessments, competency assessments and training course attendance. We can see an individuals’ actual competence for each skill as shown against the target competence.

“We also use the SkillStation to manage all training events. A calendar provides individuals with the opportunity to request attendance on any event that is being run and easy visibility of training events across the whole business.

“There are a few areas that we are focusing on for 2023, one of which is to continue to build a consistent level of foundation knowledge across the team. We do this via a series of topical training sessions where we include experienced team members from various ares of the business to share experience and knowledge. We are holding online sessions around once a month, which I host however I always ensure we have at least one other experienced member of the team attending too, which has been great for generating discussion and sharing knowledge and experience.

“Our Cutler Heights Engineering facility in Bradford has a dosing equipment training room which we use to offer training days to all team members, for refresher courses or introducing new equipment. We aim to run these quarterly as a minimum, anyone regardless of experience, from the Laundry Teams or Engineering Team can attend. They cover maintenance tasks, troubleshooting, setup and programming.

“Because we have teams UK-wide, there can be regional competency gaps. We deal with this by assessing each region through a combination of Skillstation reports and discussions with both individuals and their line managers as to what they want to prioritise. Bespoke training is then created as required.

“We are also preparing to launch a Technical Bulletin which provides a platform for sharing knowledge and experience and covers things such as projects that individuals have completed, finding resolutions to challenging customer issues and so on within the laundry field team.”

The future of the business and the role that Christeyns plays in the industry is reliant on expert knowledge and this comes from training, from learning from the expertise of others and in keeping well-informed on the industry in general.

www.christeyns.com