The company clearly recognizes the need and long term cost effectiveness of education and training. However, they are not in a position to waste funds. Consequently, they have devised a series of skills based tests and employees are placed in courses based on their defined deficiency in the skill needed for their position. These skills include personal, management and team skills. The entire company has moved to the team concept.
All employees are on teams and the idea of management has changed.
Therefore, every team undergoes a 2 week team training course to learn the interpersonal and attitudinal skills needed to work with others toward a common goal or product. Old style managers also go through a 5 day course to learn new management techniques and integration of those techniques into teams. So far, it has been difficult to devise adequate screening tests and post tests for soft skills. The entire company will be using Microsoft Office. The position of 'secretary' has dwindled and changed so that now there are far fewer secretaries and those secretarial positions that still exist are usually found in large shared pools.