TEC Working Group on Computer tools to present Individual Training Plans

Minutes of Meeting held on 17.01.2002

Minutes:

Miguel Casas-Garate is a Fellow working in AS division who will spend his time left at CERN investigating the functionality of OTA (Oracle Training Application), that is an alternative to the CTA (Core Training Application) developed at CERN.

Reinoud Martens is actually in an Oracle Conference in Amsterdam and he expects to bring back information on OTA; Miguel will contact Davide Vite who will evaluate, on the HR-TD side, the possibility to adopt OTA.

Sue reported on discussions concerning the implementation of Individual Training Plan that she had with the AS people involved (Miguel Casas, Africa Marco, Sue Foffano, Laure Estevany, Reinoud Martens and James Purvis). The new situation (less student and budget crisis…) forces to search for savings: AS has basically no resources to develop a new tool and the trend is to search for commercial products. In this line, Sue mentioned that Oracle proposes many modules with its HR package (Ex succession planning module).

She also reported a comment from Reinoud, who thought that the ITP should be part of a wider Human Resource tool. The general feeling of the WG was that a wider project would be to get a computerised MAPS form (hopefully of a "wizard" type to help the entry of information) and that the ITP tools should allow to access the part concerning training needs;

Besides, together with the description of the activity and the definition of objectives, the key elements for a skill inventory would become available in a standardised framework.

Back to the main subject of the meeting, that is the functionalities required to edit and access Individual Training Plan, the WG identified the need to edit/retrieve certain fields of information:

- Name/Group/Division and info concerning the Staff Member
- Activity for which the training is required
- Description of training required
- Reference if available
- Objective of training
- Level of expertise before the course takes place ("Present expertise" is not adequate when planning over several years)
- Source: Internal/External/Workshop/Conference
- Schedule and/or priority
- Comments and to perform the following actions:
- Get and display the summary of individual training when editing the training plan
- Modification or deletion of entries
- A "Clone" button to generate similar entries (ex courses with different levels)
- Launching of training request from the training plan.

The plan can be edited either by the staff or its supervisor, but the workflow requires the agreement of the supervisor. The formal agreement of the DTO is not required at the planning stage, however a copy is sent to the DTO with a possibility to reject or to add comments. Data protection and access rights should be similar to those in HRT.

Isabel launched a discussion on how to modify existing EDH training request in order to meet, in the short term, the ITP requests. Adding extra fields in an EDH document is fairly simple but the modification of the routing of documents is a key issue. The necessity to be able to update the ITP is a strong constraint that will require major modifications to the existing EDH facilities.

The general feeling is that it is better to concentrate on the functionalities required to design a dedicated tool. Concerning this year exercise, action should be taken at the divisional level: the minimum would be to ask that the DTO receive a copy of the training objectives stated in the MAPS form. Time forced us to postpone to the next meeting of the WG the discussion about the definition of the activity for which training is foreseen. In this view, Sylvain distributed a document on the PPA system and an extract of the review of CERN units, carried in 1992, that explains how their activities were defined. Miguel also distributed, for information and further discussion, an introduction to the OTA package.