WANTED

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I now know what the NASA Flight Director feels when he has to press the ‘abort switch’ when a multimillion pound satellite launch vehicle involving thousands of skilled man hours goes into an erratic flight path. This experience came to me on the 6th April, 1979 when, at a poorly attended Annual General Meeting of the Institution of Training Officers at Scarborough, I said farewell to the organisation disgusted with the series of events which led up to the final decision to change its name to the Institute of Training and Development. My disillusionment had gathered momentum over a period of six years with ITO's loss of direction and clear objectives occurring mainly through the long drawn‐out merger talks with the Institute of Personnel Management — these came to nothing last September with the IPM Council deciding by a narrow majority to overturn their members' ballot decision for reasons of incompatability on legal and financial grounds. In other words, the organisational ‘hang ups’ of the two organisations involved overcoming too great an inertia to allow common sense to develop an organisation with a total commitment to providing a professional service to the training and/or personnel manager. Both IPM and ITD are now going into their own orbits, which in the case of ITD is going to be an expensive struggle to reach orbital speed from a zero base. Even the appointment of a new director (ex MSC advisor George Webster) and a £10,000 PR exercise commissioned with Welbeck PR is unlikely to save them from an erratic path to oblivion. The reason is simply that you have to get your objectives right, and no amount of PR work will make any impact without the right formula. The evidence for a need to change should have been clear to see in view of the great debate surrounding the IPM/ITO merger, and also the considerable grass root support for the final proposals by both ITO and IPM members. No way should the respective Councils have thrown out proposals which had the support of at least seven thousand professional personnel and training managers. This level of support should have clearly indicated that neither organisation was providing satisfactory service to their members. The comments column of this journal (Industrial and Commercial Training) have highlighted on frequent occasions the disenchantment of the profession with not having their views projected at national level, and the MSC Training of Trainers debates have revealed the shortcomings of the present institutions to monitor and develop the professional trainer of the future.