Training

Meeting

At Royal Mail, learning never stops.
We develop staff at all levels
of our organisation. 

Some 65,000 of our people experienced formal training during 2010-2011, which involved just less than 20,000 training days. Training and development programmes include: 

  • Weekly 30 minutes’ Work Time Listening and Learning sessions (WTLL) available for frontline people once a week. An integral part of WTLL is RMTV - Royal Mail’s TV news programme, which offers a weekly round-up of the latest on our business, customers, people and community news. 
  • Royal Mail Group is committed to lifelong learning and has 100 Learn Centres throughout the UK. For example, at our Glasgow Mail Centre, we have worked alongside the Communications Workers Union (CWU)  to enable all 1,100 employees to have access to more than 50 lifelong learning courses in the workplace, ranging from computing skills to foreign languages. 
  • Learn As You Go (LAYGo), a six-week programme for aspiring or newly-appointed 'frontline' managers working in Parcelforce's depots or hubs. 
  • An NVQ-based training scheme introduced in 2011-12 when we identified a need to equip staff in our enquiry offices with the right skills for their key customer-facing roles. 
  • Royal Mail’s apprenticeship programme open to current employees as well as the wider community. In 2011-12 we revived our engineering apprentice scheme, which is now running in parallel with a similar programme for vehicle technicians. Both lead to a Level 3 national vocational qualification (NVQ) within three years. 
  • More advanced apprenticeship training and graduate schemes in areas such as Operations and Logistics, which are helping to identify and shape Royal Mail’s future leaders. 

  • Training to modernise

    Our people also need to be equipped with the skills they require if we are to successfully change working practises and modernise. We ensure that our operational training is aligned with our business priorities.

    Mail centre modernisation alone has involved training more than 6,500 of our employees to operate the new automation. This has included Compact Sequence Sorter (CSS) training as the new walk-sequencing machines are introduced.

  • A changing workforce

    We also do everything we can to help employees who leave Royal Mail Group.  With less mail to deliver, we do not need as many processing facilities as we once had. 

    Throughout this mail centre review programme, we are working closely with our union colleagues to adapt Royal Mail’s business to a changing market environment without resorting to compulsory redundancies. 

    We invest significantly in outplacement support for those leaving the business. This begins even before voluntary redundancy offers have been made to ensure people can make informed choices.

    Our Clear Choice programme helps the people affected by mail centre closures to understand their options. We work with those employees who wish to stay in the company to find alternative jobs within the business.

    For those who prefer to leave the company, we help in several ways. These include help with CVs and interview techniques and financial advice.

    These steps hopefully demonstrate that throughout the modernisation process, we are closely involving our employees and treating people with the dignity they deserve.