I met a whole host of inspirational women at a reception in the House of Lords yesterday to celebrate International Women’s Day.

It was held to launch a new training programme to develop women leaders by Tina Fahm Training Ltd, a new PR client, and was hosted by Baroness Margaret Prosser, Deputy Chair of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights. (more on this later).

One of the speakers was Dr Emma Parry, a senior research fellow at Cranfield School of Management, who voiced concern that the recession would instinctively make organisations want to cut their training budget.

Emma gave a very persuasive argument why this was not a good idea:

“We know that people are now cutting recruitment budgets and freezing recruitment, so if you want to have the skills for your organisation to be competitive, it is important that you develop the people you have already got. A good example of this is South West Airlines in the States. Back in 2001 in the US recession, they actually increased their training budget and what they ended up with was a skilled, but also a very well motivated workforce. That allowed them to survive the recession while other airlines struggled then.

“In a climate where many organisations are freezing recruitment, the development of existing staff is particularly important. An excellent example of achieving this is an organisation called Mines Rescue, which not surprisingly do exactly what you might expect, they are a health and safety consultancy that were originally formed to manage the rescue of mine workers.

“In the 90s, their only one customer was the British Coal Industry, and that went into a pretty rapid decline about that time. So what they needed to do to survive was change their main business. They upskilled everyone and their brigadesmen (these are what Mines Rescue called their rescuers) were upskilled to instructors, assessors and teachers. The organisation has now changed so that 80% of their business is in training as opposed to 20%.

“They have now totally turned around their business and now have 1,400 customers rather than one. That is a pretty impressive expansion. They have a turnover of about £8 million a year and present quite a convincing argument as to why training is important in the current recession.”

I think this is a pretty incredible success and survival story. Do you know of other organisations where staff have had to adapt to new roles in similar circumstances? Is your organisations cutting back on training because of the recession, and do you think it is a good idea?