Galway Independant – 14th May, 2008 – More than 350 secondary school students from Galway and Leitrim descended on Sligo IT last week to learn more about good financial habits for life in the extended learning workshop, Bank Your Future, the unique national financial education initiative by Junior Achievement, generously supported by Bank of America.

Students from Calasanctius College in Oranmore were among the 350 attendees. “Empowering young people with the skills surrounding the complex area of personal finance will allow these students not only a firm understanding of their future financial choices and responsibilities but also of the importance of their career choices and potential to create fulfilling and independent lives,” said Mr Ian O’Doherty, Ireland Country Executive, Bank of America, launching Bank Your Future.

More than 700 students across Dublin, Leitrim, Cork and Galway will this academic year participate in this new initiative developed to educate students on how to establish good financial habits to carry them through their adult lives. Bank Your Future is a six-week programme taught in the classroom by independent business volunteers from a variety of business backgrounds.

Bank Your Future programme includes:

• the importance of education and its role in improving potential earning power;
• balancing salary and expenditure;
• using credit and cash wisely;
• the importance of saving;
• the benefits of insurance;
• creating and analysing the performance of a share portfolio.

Bank of America is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk-management products and services. In Ireland Bank of America employs over 1,000 associates across its two facilities in Dublin and Carrick-on-Shannon providing financial products and services for individual customers and large corporations.

Junior Achievement, a worldwide organisation established in Ireland in 1995, brings enterprise education to young people throughout Ireland teaching them about the world of work, helping them to set goals, plan for their future and learn the skills necessary to succeed in a fast changing world. Junior Achievement aims to fill the gap where young people have no connection with business or a role model to inspire them to succeed in life. The organisation does this with the active and financial support of 150 leading Irish businesses across the commercial spectrum. Hands-on experiences help students to understand the economics of life. In partnership with businesses and educators, Junior Achievement brings the real world to young people, opening their minds to their potential.

Redborne Upper School has deployed Paragon, an online Continuous Professional Development (CPD) tool, to enhance the ongoing teacher training and performance management process for the school’s staff and their assessors.

Developed by CPD and performance management specialists Vantage Technologies, Paragon supports teachers’ development and training requirements by allowing them to record evidence of their training in an easy-to-access e-portfolio, and their mentors to access and monitor the evidence to provide feedback on their progress.

A key benefit of Paragon is its accessibility. With all CPD information stored in a single location and securely accessible over the Internet at any time by both mentors and staff, performance and development is easier to monitor and manage. Subsequently, the appraisal process is continuous and more effective, and the overall standards of teaching and learning are boosted.

Paragon enables schools to follow recently revised professional standards for performance management more closely. Staff can log evidence of their performance and ongoing training in support of meeting the standards. Being able to rate themselves against the standards means teachers are more aware of their professional development needs, they can then create an action plan based on these needs, making training more focused. Furthermore Paragon’s unique Idea’s Generator feature allows them to access its library of resources to assist them in creating their action plans.

Nigel Croft, head teacher at Redborne Upper school, said: “Paragon helps individuals to understand their strengths and weaknesses and make more informed decisions about their training needs. It also gives mentors and the school a clearer picture of trainees’ progress, enabling us to offer more targeted in-house training by matching their skills to a training need.

“Reports can also be generated in Paragon to see how the department, or school, is progressing, and head teachers can use the this evidence to demonstrate achievements during inspections. This system will really support school improvement and it’s something I would strongly recommend to all schools.”

Traditional performance management meetings are held annually and only allow an hour to discuss the teacher’s previous and the following years’ targets. John Gunn, director of Redborne Training School, explains: “This traditional system is fraught with problems; for some it’s the only time they talk to their manager about their targets and achievements and as it’s paper based there is no transparency or easy way for senior managers to understand CPD needs or targets across the school.

“Paragon helps people at all levels see performance management as a continuous process so discussions at meetings between teacher and reviewer are much more focussed as both parties understand where the member of staff is in relation to their targets.”

Successful initial trials of Paragon mean it has gone live to around 100 Redborne teaching staff; it will be rolled out to the remainder of school staff including, teaching assistants, laboratory assistants and admin assistants later in the year.

Source: PublicTechnology.Net

UK – May 12th, 2008 – The skills survey report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reveals that in 45 per cent of public sector organizations there has been a cut in training budgets over the past 12 months. The indications are that the continued post-Gershon squeeze is encouraging employers to reduce the head count and to cut costs across personnel activities.

Voluntary sector organisations continue to spend more per employee per year on training, compared with both the private and public sectors.  With 77 per cent in the sector reporting that funding for training has remained stable or increased, compared with 75 per cent in the private sector and 54 per cent in the public sector.

The report also shows a disconnect between what government is offering employers and what they feel they need from young people coming out of school, college or university.  Literacy and numeracy are still concerns for employers, but also there is a need for the so-called soft-skills.  Two thirds of respondent organisations feel that new employees lack both communication and interpersonal skills and over half report a shortfall in management and leadership skills.

“Learn Skills can offer employers web-based skills and compliance training to address these key concerns, by giving them access to a comprehensive course catalog”, said Sean Griffin, Co-Founder of Learn Skills, “and the Learn Skills platform can deliver both cost savings and consistent quality instruction to all employees and management resulting in increased and enhanced performance.”