Any advice, suggestions or comments on the following would be much appreciated as I'm stumped!!

Firstly my background. I work for large contract manufacturer here in Ireland as a Technical Training Coorindinator. We employ 350 people and approx 150 of those people are technician's for whom I have training responsibility. I have worked for the company for 5 years in this role. My company, as I mentioned, are a contract manufacturer. We currently have one customer for whom we currently manufacture approx 11 million products per month across 7 high speed, automated production lines. The work the Technicians do is very technical and it takes quite a lot of training to bring them up to speed.

We were, up to about a year ago, manufacturing approx 5 million products per month. Most of our training required a level of line access to the production lines. This in effect meant that the lines could not run. It was not an issue as we always had flexibility to schedule downtime for training and we had always delivered quality training to our technicians. However we are no manufacturing 11 million products and have double the amount of technicians. It is becoming harder and harder to schedule downtime due to the demands placed on our production lines. I have implemented as many "offline" course as possible either by acquiring a second part of the production equipment and incorporated this into the training room or by working with the trainers to move all of the course into an offline, theory only course. However we have now reached a stage where we need to deliver more training than ever but we are getting zero line time.

It is now time for us to change the way we do training and I'm trying to come up with innovative ways to do this. I'm leaning more and more towards the idea of a mentoring system where each new technician will be buddied with an experienced tech for a set period. I will develop a training road map for them which will be used as a week to week training map which I will review with each trainer at the end of each day/week/month or whatever.

However this will be very difficult to implement for a number of reasons. The top 2 being A/ the current ratio of experienced technicians/mentors to trainees and B/ trainers still need an element of line access to train trainees. There is no substitute in some instances.

Thinking "outside the box" has anyone any suggestions? It would be much appreciated.

Try he following: Train during the lunch period,if long enough, pay them and supply lunch . Train after work and pay them. Train on weekends and pay them. Also read the accounts
of training in the defense plants of WWII, allied and Axsis, Albert Speer and the Japaneese
Extra cost??? But you have spend money to make money, as long its wisely done.

Nero

Thanks for the advice Nero. The problem is, and I should have mentioned this, our lines run 24*7. Through (staggered) lunch breaks. The issue isn't so much people it's access to the line which is why I need to explore other methods of training.

In your original post you wrote:

"I'm leaning more and more towards the idea of a mentoring system where each new technician will be buddied with an experienced tech for a set period. I will develop a training road map for them which will be used as a week to week training map which I will review with each trainer at the end of each day/week/month or whatever."

I would agree with you on that direction and recommend learning more about setting up a Learning Path that includes coaching, mentoring, practice and experience organized in activities from simple to complex (mastering the simplest skill first, then advancing to the next one) and designed to get employees up to speed sooner than traditional training.

A Learning Path can be designed to make employees productive beginning from the first day of employment. In a few of the Learning Paths I have done, seating or placing a new employee next to an experienced one who mentors was a common theme, and that experienced person as well as the manager were armed with a "Coach's Guide" to follow and a "Skills Validation Checklist" to use to monitor their progress towards proficiency. As an example, one Learning Path was accelerated from 3 weeks to get up to speed to 2 weeks (33%), and in the third week the new employees actually exceeded the production output of an average performer.

You can read more at http://www.elearning-engineering.com/learning-paths.htm or http://www.learningpathconsultants.com/ and then decide for yourself whether it is useful to you.

Pat thankyou very much for your input. I'll review your links.