Michelin Clocks Up Half a Million Hours of Training Success

Michelin Training Centre is celebrating delivering its 500,000th hour of high training. The centre, which is close to Michelin’s UK headquarters in Campbell Road, Stoke-on-Trent, was set up at the start of 2002 and sees an average of over 3,000 people from all over the world come through its doors each year. The modern teaching environment provides both internal and external training on everything from basic time management to tyre related aspects of crash scene investigation.

In addition to the company’s own manufacturing and business staff, Michelin’s Training Centre is used by organisations such as the Police, the MOD and retailers to train staff about tyre design, construction and performance. The amount of training now being held at the Centre is being seen as a good indicator of how important Michelin believes the MTC will be for its ongoing success.

Internal training carried out at the centre is focused on making Michelin more effective by providing employees with a better understanding of the company’s products and business objectives. Michelin training staff are all certified by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and deal with everything from regrooving truck tyres to strategic business planning.

Some of the Centre’s more advanced courses go into detail on how to examine a tyre, using a combination of its condition and additional specific knowledge of vehicles and applications, to determine how it has been used in service. The Accident Investigators’ Course looks at how a tyre may have contributed to a road traffic incident. It is believed that this is a unique insight into this discipline and is of particular use to Police Vehicle Examiners and Collision Investigators, who come from all over the country to attend.

Richard Whitehurst, Commercial Training Manager at the Centre explains: “An important aspect of the Centre’s role is in the retail sector, where we teach our car, motor, truck and bus customers how to fit our tyres properly, how to prevent potential problems and how to recognise misuse or the cause of damage. These last two also form a major component of the third area we cover, which is aimed at the Police. We run a five day Accident Investigators’ Course, where they learn how important tyres are to a vehicle’s handling, how to identify specific tyres, and how to examine the tyre to discover how it might have been affected before, during and after an incident.”

On the truck side the courses are accredited by both the Institute of the Motor Industry and City & Guilds, and are part of the Michelin Business Advantage (MBA) programme. The four training modules that make up the MBA programme cover technical and servicing aspects, a license to fit and roadside recovery, with each course lasting between one and five days.

With delegates being attracted to the Centre from as far and wide as Israel, Nigeria and Turkey, the facility provides a welcome boost for the region’s leisure and hospitality industries. Almost 3,500 beds were booked in local hotels and B&Bs as a result of individuals attending courses in 2007, with local caterers, retailers and travel organisations also benefiting from an increased demand for their services. Instructors from the Centre are also called to provide training in other countries. Most recently lecturers have visited Michelin offices in Romania and India to train staff in effective customer service.