The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, FAAN, has saved over N500 million from its in-house training programme for its staff across airports in the last one year.
General Manager of the aviation parastatal, Mr. Nath McAbraham Inajoh, who spoke said, the huge sum would have been paid to its 5000 workers as duty tour allowance for the period.
He said the in-house training system had to be adopted as the management was reluctant in embarking on any training due to paucity of funds.
“Between 2013 and 2017, it’s been tough training in FAAN because of the economic situation and the panic I had was how do you supervise a department that is not doing anything because of paucity of funds, so we put our heads together and made a proposal to management and we said okay, what is the problem when its comes to the training, we discovered it was cost.
“In government, when you pay a consultant N3 million for a two-day programme and you have a class of 30 staff, you are going to pay the staff around N7 million for DTA’s. The cost of that training is N10 million, when the management sees N10 million, they would back off, the better part1 of the cost I saw was actually the allowances that go to staff. So, how do you manage that.”
Inajoh said while operating on a zero budget, they ensured that no staff was taken out for the whole day to avoid paying them anything.
“The book says when you take a staff out for a one day training, there is a stipulated amount you are going to pay the staff multiply by the number of the days you are going to take the staff out and depending on the location. We decided to come up with an in- house training programme when staff are not paid DTA what did we do, we were not taking them out for the whole day, we were taking them out for three hours.”
Inajoh explained that for staff outside Lagos, they solicited the support of the airport manager for a return ticket and accommodation for its training facilitators to train all staff without any fee.
“On staff outside of Lagos, we spoke to the airport managers and said look, we are operating a zero budget but this is what you can do for us, we want a return ticket for facilitators of the training department, give them a place to stay and train all the staff in your airport without any fee, we have trained around the 22 airports”.
The GM training FAAN observed that the system had assisted the organization and the trainees in various ways, adding that in a recession period one can either be defensive or offensive.
According to him, operational survival, process audit cost cutting, advertising and open communication are strategies management can adopt to survive.
