I spent a very pleasant afternoon at the Shelbourne Hotel at the Fas Excellence Through People lunch, the purpose of which was to present newly qualified companies with their certificates. Guest of Honour was the Minister For Labour Affairs, Frank Fahey TD who made the actual presentations.
Of course it was all work for me. I was there to interview the Minister and the programme director John Butler. I had spent the previous 48 hours interviewing 15 companies asking them why they got involved in the scheme and what they learnt from it. All of this research is for a supplement on the scheme that will appear in the Irish Independent in mid-May.
The Excellence Through People programe is designed as a Human Resources and Development equivalent to the ISO 9000 standard. To qualify, companies have to show how they have made the connection between their business plan and their training plan and they review the retur on investment in training. The also have to have good communications throughout their organisation and they have to document their processes. As part of the assessment process, the assessor examines the paperwork and interviews randomly selected employees at all levels of the organisation.
The interesting thing is that apart from the UK no other European country has anything similar in place.
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