Courses Offer A Leg Up For Managers In The Front Line

The Age

Saturday October 29, 2005

Claire Halliday

Frontline management studies can boost the effectiveness of those already in the job. By Claire Halliday.

MARIA PETROULIAS was just out of high school when she started working for a small factory that produced parts for the automotive industry. Her duties at first involved answering the single phone line and making tea for the handful of employees who worked with her. Thirty years later, Ms Petroulias is an office manager at what has become a large, now national business that employs more than 100 people.

She comes, she says, from the days when experience and "doing the hard yards" was the way to climb the ladder. A time when degrees were something that, outside of the obvious professions such as medicine and law, were rarely seen.

"I am holding my job as manager but there is the feeling - especially now that we are expanding and dealing with so many other companies - that I might be out of date a bit," Ms Petroulias says. "I mean, I have experience in this particular business because I've been here so long but I haven't ever done any courses in how to be a manager. A lot of the other people I deal with now at other firms have."

Times, it seems, have changed. To gain employment as a manager today, experience in a specific business can still count but often a degree in business management or human resources management - regardless of a lack of specific industry runs on the board - can mean a lot more.

According to the Council of Adult Education's manager of industry programs, Anna Walker, its new Frontline Management Training course aims to give people with existing experience the added managerial confidence to help them keep ahead of their workplace competition.

"A lot of people out there in the workplace have management responsibilities but they often have no formal qualifications," Ms Walker says.

"When more and more people with formal qualifications come into the business - or just the world they do business in - even with a lifetime of experience, not having any official management training can make them lose confidence."

Ms Walker says students who complete the CAE course will end up with a "Diploma in Frontline Management", after a year of part-time study.

What they will also take away with them, Ms Walker hopes, is the ability to "think outside the box".

"They will have widened their parameters, increased their confidence, created networks and learnt from each other," she says.

For employers who send employees to expand their skills with frontline management studies, the results will be, Ms Walker hopes, increased morale.

"If an employer has paid for the course and encouraged staff to do it, they feel like they are valued. As an employer, you are really doing succession planning, which is a smart move for an employer because you are retaining staff with existing experience within your company and giving them even more knowledge. If you up-skill your staff, they are being prepared for promotion. That means a lot to an employee," Ms Walker says.

The benefit for company bosses who enrol staff in frontline management studies is the opportunity to get industry-specific, tailored sessions.

It's a way of studying frontline management that is also offered at the Melbourne Business School and through Box Hill Institute of Tafe's Diploma of Business (Frontline Management).

"We can go out and deliver on-site to companies and tailor the tutorials specifically to the industry," says Box Hill Institute's industry training co-ordinator, Merrilyn Wolf. "By tailoring it in that way it makes the course even more effective because the people doing it can immediately relate back to their daily working life. If people are studying it independently, it is more general."

Ms Wolf says the development of the course, four years ago, arose from a need throughout Australia for managers to have people management and strategic management skills along with well-developed communication skills across all industries from trade to financial organisations.

"Frontline managers need to be able to manage both their own performance and that of others, as well as the important operations relating to their work," she adds. "In the past, people have just moved up into management jobs within their industry. Now there is more pressure to have some sort of official training or qualification."

Frontline Management training is relevant, CAE's Ms Walker believes, to a wide range of job descriptions and job titles.

"For example, a person with a qualification in Frontline Management may outperform people in the following jobs: supervisor, superintendent, area manager, office manager, or leading hand," Ms Walker says.

The ideal student? According to Ms Walker, the people who will gain the most out of frontline management studies are people already in the workforce.

"I would say it is not suitable for an 18-year-old school leaver," Ms Walker says. "It's about having some skill or knowledge of the workplace and upgrading it so that your career prospects are even better."