Addressing delegates yesterday at the CIPD Conference in Manchester, Vice Admiral Charles Montgomery, second sea lord and commander-in-chief, Naval Home Command at the Royal Navy, said: “For us, excellence in training is not an option – the risk of getting it wrong [with staff training] is just too high.”
Montgomery described the Navy as “bottom-feeding”, in that staff join as school leavers or graduates, working their way up over 35 years, to senior ranks, and entry at middle levels is virtually impossible. This means an HR strategy has to consider a 30-year development plan for employees.
“Training needs to be realistic,” said Montgomery. “But the complex technology we use means we have had to embrace synthetic training [using simulators].
“We have to create absolute standards and enforce values of courage, commitment, respect, loyalty and integrity – the values Naval people over centuries would recognise.
“But training is not about barked orders – it is about coaching individuals to develop their own training.”
The Royal Navy, which currently employs 35,000 staff across military and civilian roles, will be forced to make almost 5,000 roles redundant by 2015.
Montgomery, whose role incorporates HR strategy, said: “We are currently developing a cost model for training – but we have to bore down to make our training more cost-effective. We are working with the Army and the Royal Air Force, and we are working with private sector organisations for nuclear training.”
But he added: “The quality of people coming through the Navy now is better than at any time in my 38 years of service.”
Montgomery has worked with public and private sector organisations to compare the methods they used to reduce headcount and the organisation has already notified those ranks that will not be affected by any redundancies.
But he has been working with organisations, such as the Career Transitions Partnership, to prepare staff facing redundancy to move into the private sector.
Responding to the challenge that ex-Navy staff had no experience of business strategy, he said: “We will be losing 4,000 trained and motivated people. Loads of people in the Navy are doing business development – but we do lack profit and loss experience and this is the kind of gap our staff will have to bridge.”
