Located in Leixlip, Co. Kildare, 12 miles west of Dublin, Hewlett Packard (Manufacturing) Ltd. has been manufacturing in Ireland since 1995. The company employs approximately 2,000 people at their Leixlip plant in the manufacture of Inkjet Cartridges for HP's Colour Printers. Inevitably, for an operation of this size and with the highly sophisticated manufacturing technology evolving at a faster and faster pace, HP needs to ensure that they have an adaptive, highly expert team of maintenance technicians onsite at all times.
Traditionally, maintenance technicians were drawn from a pool of skilled crafts workers who had been through a single craft apprenticeship. HP has had to compete, especially during times of high economic growth, for the best of these skilled crafts workers. More significantly, it became clear some years ago that in order to have adaptable technicians, able to work across different processes and machinery that was being updated all the time, there was increasingly a need for multi-skilled craftsmen with a knowledge of integrated control systems technology. To achieve this, in more recent years, the company has been funding technicians through part-time education programmes in local further and higher education institutes, and then undertaking 'conversion' courses onsite. However, there was a very high cost associated with this and, in 2000, the company workforce development team began discussions with the FAS Training Centre at Cabra in search of an alternative approach.
...continue to training needs (HP)
|
