Professionals

Catalyst in promoting smarter work

Hiran H. SENEWIRTANE

LIFE SKILLS: Most Sri Lankans have the skills and ability to perform their jobs but do not have the vision and ambition go up the corporate ladder. Most of them are happy with mediocre performances, a leading Corporate- Trainer Gihan Talgodapitiya said.

Thalgodapitiya has been in corporate training for more than 20 years. He has conducted corporate training programmes to enhance productivity and soft skills of corporate sector company employees not in Sri Lanka and also in other countries including Singapore and India.

In the last 15 years he has helped leading corporates to improve human resource by providing training and development programmes for them to work smart.

At present more than 300 leading companies are working with him which are mostly leading corporates in the country.

The biggest problem that he sees is that top managements in every company in this country do not have a sustained commitment to improve their employees' knowledge.

Talgodapitiya said their training programmes are geared to all management segments, covering lower management to top management such as CEO level, which are conducted in Sinhala and English.

Talagodapitiya Associates has conducted thousands of training programmes for persons in all walks of life including school children. Under his stewardship he has formed an institute called the Personal Development Institute, which runs specialised character building programmes for children.

Most of their training programmes focus on strategic planning on how to manage business organisations and the unique factor is that they constantly follow up their trainees on a regular basis to ensure that they practice what they learned during their training programmes, he said.

Talgodapitiya also closely works with leading garment factories including MAS Holdings, Hirdaramani and many more.

The Institute provides training programmes for more than 200 garment factories in the country.

The Institute also provides training for leading corporates as well. Generally it conducts one to four day programmes with interactive sessions.

Talgodapitiya has conducted training overseas programmes for the last 10 years in Singapore, Vietnam, India and many countries for the corporate sector.

In Singapore it is also working with the public sector and in Bangalore they provide training programmes for the apparel sector.

Talgodapitiya is working closely with the International Labour Organisation to provide training on their global factory improvement programme. The company also works with many NGOs and foreign professional bodies.

In their training programmes they mainly cover innovation and creativity, service quality improvements, leadership motivation and teamwork and strategic management.

It also conducts training programmes on the Japanese 5 S system and Kaizen system as well. These programmes are conducted in a professional and understandable manner.

Recently, Talgodapitiya Associates tied up with Coca-Cola company and launched a programme called Brave World to improve the character building of children in the country. The company has involved them as a part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme.

This programme is also geared to improve the value systems of them as well. Last year they held many programmes for under-privileged children taking these programme countrywide. Up to now they had provided training for more than 700 children covering tsunami affected areas, Talgodapitiya said.