Janette Benaddi MICR CSci & Paul Wathall MICR
Keywords
2012 prospectus, Client-hosted training, eLearning, New courses, Standardised curriculum, Standardised role competencies, Training, Virtual environment
This is a time of year when we’re all thinking about performance reviews, both for ourselves and for the teams that we manage. More importantly, we should all be working to turn those backwards-looking reviews into forward-looking plans for the next steps in our professional development. For most of us, that equates to training, whether we’re looking to refresh or reinforce an existing skill or to add a new one to our toolkit.
We launched our
2012 Learning Prospectus several months ago, and many of you have already booked places on next year’s training courses. As this is the time when training plans receive more attention, we’ve decided to put our courses in the spotlight. You should have received an email in the past couple of weeks, listing
every training course in our calendar for 2012. This makes it even easier for you to think about the sort of training you need.
Training is something that ICR has always done very well; we train hundreds of professionals every year, and we’ve added several new courses to next year’s schedule, alongside updating and “polishing” some of our most popular courses. But it’s important to realise that all training courses are not created equal: a one-day course on GCP from one organisation won’t necessarily cover material in the same way as one from a different provider, possibly giving different interpretations of the facts, or presenting information in a more usable or accessible way. This is why it’s vital to take care in selecting your training provider, and our track record of consistently delivering high quality, up-to-date training for decades demonstrates that ICR is a trustworthy source to meet your training needs.
Beyond this, though, is the question of harmonisation of training across the industry. Does a senior CRA in company X really do such a different job from a senior CRA in company Y that they need extensive retraining, rather than just an update on specific SOPs, when they change companies? Wouldn’t it be better for individuals and organisations alike if company Y could recognise the training delivered within company X as being equivalent? That could happen if the training is based on a curriculum and set of role-based competencies that had been developed and agreed by experts from across the profession, with as little geographical variation as possible. This is something that ICR is currently working towards, with partners from throughout the global industry. Watch this space…
Of course, your boss might say that time or money is tight. That is no barrier to your development, because we can now deliver our most popular courses to your entire team. Over the past few years,
our “client-hosted” training has become increasingly popular with companies looking to make the most of their training budgets. In addition to reducing delegates’ travel and accommodation costs, we can also tailor the course to refer to your own SOPs etc.
Finally, we also have a special offer on
our industry-standard elearning modules, so you can provide GCP training to all the site personnel on your study, for example, for less than you’d expect. We’re also working on the next generation of ICR elearning products, and other forms of online learning, from hybrid models of elearning with “live” support all the way through to fully interactive web-based training in a “virtual academy” environment.
So, there is plenty that ICR can do now to help you get maximum value from departmental training budgets, which we know are being squeezed across the profession. We’re excited about the new courses that we’ve added to our prospectus, and even more excited about the new technologies we’re using to raise the quality, accessibility and value of professional training over the coming years.
Janette Benaddi MICR CSci is Chief Executive Officer of Medvance and Chair of the ICR Board of Directors. Paul Wathall MICR is Chief Executive Officer of The Institute of Clinical Research.
