NEWS
constructionmanagermagazine.com
Interview
‘CHANGE IS OUR NEW CONSTANT’ TURNER & TOWNSEND’S UK MANAGING DIRECTOR PATRICIA MOORE TELLS NEIL GERRARD HOW THE COMPANY IS UPSKILLING ITS WORKERS IN PREPARATION FOR THE DIGITAL AGE If you want to know why training is such a big issue at consultancy firm Turner & Townsend, then you only need to look at the sheer number of its new recruits each year. It’s a people-hungry business, bringing on board 1,000 employees in the last year alone to help support its growth rate of around 20% per year. “We’ve been in double-digit growth for as long as I can remember,” says UK managing director Patricia Moore. “We are delivering 10% growth in the UK, which in current market conditions and the scale we are currently at is a strong performance as well.” The business prides itself on delivering technical excellence and in order to try to differentiate itself from the competition, it needs to train people in the “T&T way”. To that end, Turner & Townsend has recently overhauled its training for both incoming graduates and management, in a way that takes account not just of its growth, but of the rapidly shifting way in which the construction and property sectors are evolving.
Revising the training programme A core part of that change is the company’s new ‘technical training academy’. “All of our people in our technical competence areas will work through a series of different levels in the technical training academy to get ultimately to advanced level,” Moore explains. The course, which has four levels of attainment, is delivered
through a series of digital and classroom modules and ends up with scenariobased training where employees get to solve a problem together, which Moore claims “really embeds the learning”. Meanwhile, the company is completely redesigning its management training and its global leadership programme and that change too is related to the company’s rapid growth as well as wider
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18/02/2020 10:23