Dear WAO participant,

 You have registered for the 1998 Accelerator Operations Workshop, which
 will take place this May in Vancouver.  As Chairman of the Workshop Session
 on Staff Training and Development, I would like to ask you if you consider
 presenting a poster at the Workshop on Operator Training at your Facility. 
 The Program Committee would like to get as many of the participating labs
 as possible to submit poster presentations.  We believe these poster
 presentations will greatly enhance the quantity and quality of the
 information exchange that will occur during the workshop.  The idea of
 these posters is to look at how each lab addresses Training issues.

 The following list of questions may help stimulate ideas for your poster:

   -What type of staff do you recruit for the Control Room as Accelerator
    Operators (technicians, engineers, university graduates)?

   -Do you have any preferred backgrounds for your Operators?

   -Do you recruit internally or externally?  Why?

   -How much time do operators spend operating?  What do they do
    outside of this time?

   -How many levels of operator do you have?

   -How much time and money do you invest in training, initially and
    after "qualification"?

   -Training programs:
      Is your program self-paced?
      Do you assign a mentor to the new operator?
      If so what are the mentor’s responsibilities?
      What is the importance of on the job training?
      Do you have internal training courses? 
      If so who presents them?
      Do you use external courses?  If so do you find them useful?

   -How do you monitor training progress?  How do you qualify operators
    and how long does it take?  What kind of training records do you keep?

   -Do you consider your method of training efficient?  What aspects are
    efficient and which need improving? 
      
   -Do you think your program would work at other sites?
                
         
 To help make it easy for attendees to compare how each lab handles these
 functions, we suggest that each of the posters follows a similar format. 
 This format is not meant to restrict how the information is presented,
 but should enable people to quickly find the key information that they
 are interested in.  A  sample layout can be found on the WAO’98 WWW page:-

             http://www.triumf.ca/wao98/format.html 

 If you are interested is presenting a poster for the Training session or
 any other session please contact me or any other member of the Program
 Committee.

 Looking forward to seeing you in May ,
        
                Simon Baird     baird@ps.msm.cern.ch