Behind the scenes… The Learning and Development Team
The third in our Behind the Scenes blogs introduces you to the learning and development team at AssessTech who have the role of ensuring that Assessors, IQAs, Instructors, Trainers and Candidates are all up-to-date in their training and competence requirements.
Katrina Thomas is a learning and development consultant for AssessTech. An outgoing, friendly, confident and chatty person, Katrina engages with different individuals, mainly in operational roles, across the railway industry to help them along their NVQ journey to achieve the final qualification.
A big driver for the team is to create consistent training which ensures everyone is trained to the same objectives. This is being rolled out over the next few months.
A sports fanatic, Katrina plays for a local netball team. She is also a Mum to two young children who are a key focus of her weekend activities.
Paul Wallis is a learning and development specialist. With 47 years working across rail operations, management and learning and development he brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the team. Paul designs and delivers courses on rail operations subjects as well as training, assessing and quality assurance of new trainers, assessors and internal quality assurers.
A quiet and focused individual, Paul is seen as ‘flamboyant’ when in front of the individuals he is training. Paul is excited about the on train data recorder (black box) training for the driver managers which will be rolled out over the next few months.
And when he is not working, Paul likes to listen to music, read a variety of books and explore the local countryside taking long walks.
As a consultant in learning and development, Lionel Stevenson provides training and assessments for a variety of faculties within the rail network. His focus is to help maintain current standards to ensure quality training is provided for all candidates, providing guidance and support throughout the training period to ensure their development needs are achieved.
Lionel comes across lots of enthusiastic learners in his job and he really enjoys sharing his knowledge and experience with them.
Lionel loves to travel and is very proud of his latest achievement on a recent trip – learning to abseil down waterfalls in Hawaii! He also is a keen Kilmarnock football fan and will travel to matches when he can.
Paul Verghese is an associate consultant for AssessTech, who has delivered investigative training courses and training and assessment for projects such as Crossrail. He has started his own TOC and has had many senior and Director level roles in the Rail industry. A serial entrepreneur, he likes to help company scale up and grow and has had experience working with corporate and SMEs across education, recruitment and engineering as well as delivering across managing, sales and operational directorships.
Paul’s passion is to help train and develop new talent into the rail industry as well as steer talent retention and is currently helping shape the Rail Industry apprenticeship offering in line with Government Policy.
Now that he has completed his Masters, Paul enjoys working out and partaking in Thai Boxing.
In a recent interview, Paul said of AssessTech, “Competence Management is all about embracing current technology to help assessors becoming more dynamic using the tools available. ACMS gives assessors a licence to think rather than just go through current processes, ticking boxes. It helps stimulate creativity within your people, giving them their own viewpoint on their competence, which ultimately enables you to develop their skills.
“AssessTech are all about helping break down barriers. A highly innovative company, they listen to their customers and create industry led solutions adapted to the customers who use them.”
