Employment and training initiatives

Carlisle City Council’s training activities

We believe that it is important to give staff the skills to be able to carry out their job and to provide opportunities to develop their career.  Our training and development activities for our staff include a range of activities designed to do this.

Appraisal - each year every employee has an appraisal with their manager to discuss what training is best for them.

Internal vacancies and secondments – all vacancies and secondment opportunities are advertised to give staff an opportunity to broaden their experience.

Development courses – the Council’s City First programme for its staff contains modules on a number of management and personal development areas and is open to all employees. The programme also includes a number of essential management skills such as interviewing and selection and appraisal.

Essential training – there are a number of subjects that we believe are so essential to work in the Council that we expect all employees to attend. Examples of these include:

• Induction
• Computer skills (appropriate to each job)
• Lifting and handling
• Health and safety as it affects individual jobs
• Data Protection & Freedom of Information Act

Professional qualifications – where practical employees are encouraged to gain externally recognised qualifications that would benefit them in their current or future jobs. These can range from a basic CLAIT (Computer Literacy And Information Technology), first aid certificates, NVQs of various levels to vocational degrees and other professional qualifications.

Keeping up to date – we all need to keep our skills and knowledge up to date and the Council’s training activities cover this. It can be through internal courses, reading, learning from an employee who has this knowledge or attending external ‘update’ type of courses, especially in those professions where the person is expected to have a specified amount of professional updating each year.

Skills for life – this supports the government initiative to raise levels of literacy and numeracy amongst those adults that do not have a basic qualification in these skills. We have adopted innovated ways of doing this. One real success is that some of our staff improved their literacy and numeracy through using computers. We were the first Council in the north west to achieve the ‘Go Award’ (an award given to organisations who achieve excellence in the Skills for Life initiative.