Dominic Carey - **HAS LEFT**

Said the following about Odis Palmer:

“Great Western Railway (GWR) is one of the biggest rail franchises in the UK, part of the First Group of companies, operating the Western network since 1996, rebranding ourselves as GWR in 2015. We employ over 6000 people across our network and we carry more than one and a half million customers over two million single journeys on 10,000 services every week. People are at the heart of our business and our ethos is that we are 'greater together'.

Odis worked at Newbury Station in Ticket office before joining the training team. He started out as a retail trainer, but his demeanour and energy made him an ideal person to welcome new starters into the business. Odis now trains Corporate Welcome and GEMS as well as CEDD (helping operation colleagues help customer during times of disruption).

Odis loves working on projects and has made peer training his own course, redesigning the course from scratch to help shape our peer trainers and Gateline assessors to be role models and teach them how to develop others. He remains course manager of these courses and ensures that those takes a great deal of his time to ensure other trainers delivering this course are well practised in its delivery and ethos.

Odis has a passion for developing others and the highlight this year has to be the Princes Trust programme. He has worked tirelessly to totally transform the training element of the programme, working in close partnership with Recruitment and GWR’s Engagement Manager (Dominic Carey) who oversees the Prince’s Trust programme management for GWR.

As Dominic has observed:

“Odis’ expertise has been absolutely critical in GWR being able to achieve its objective of fully transforming the previous ‘Get Into’ 4-week programme model into something even more effective. Our aim at the start of 2019 was to redesign the programme, working with internal experts like Odis and our delivery partners at the Prince’s Trust to enhance the quality of the practical life skills support given to the young participants and to find a practical way of increasing the job outcomes for the young people at the end of the programme.

Following several months of hard work, the new design/approach was tested during a summer programme, and the it was successful beyond expectation. One of the major reasons for this was the training redesign that Odis had been personally responsible for. The introduction of a lighter approach, with increased focus of practical life skills and emotional development (and decreased procedural detail), and the development of a new ‘Learning Passport’ which could define individual learning goals and track achievement through the programme, was transformational for the young participants. At the end of the programme they had a ‘take away’ record of their achievement and our Recruitment team was able to adjust or recruitment process to enable this to serve as evidence of competence enhancing the application process for the young people after the programme and increase the chances of them passing through successfully.

During the programme Odis also invested lots of extra time to build direct relationships with each young person and provide support beyond the classroom, staying in regular contact with them through the rest of the programme after the training had completed, making sure they had any extra support they required.

The Prince’s Trust after the programme had completed made this observation about the programme and Odis specifically:

‘GWR’s support/organisation was excellent, the best support levels ever given on a Get Into Programme and the GWR training provided by Odis was especially excellent, transforming the confidence levels of the young people, making sure they were fully ready for the work experience phase. The Learning Passport was an especially amazing product (we have not come across anything like this with any other employer partner).’

I cannot commend Odis enough for his support, and he has directly transformed not just the lives of the young people on the recent programme, he has also been directly responsible for opening up a new chapter for GWR, since we now have a brand-new approach to used in the future to transform even more young lives for the better.”

Odis is passionate about diversity in the workplace and has worked with the Head of Engagement to host meetings for BAME and some of our Disabled customers. Having attended neuro diversity seminar earlier this year, Odis is now working on how this will translate into training within our team.

His love of technology and extreme PowerPoint skills makes his courses interactive and exciting. He is keen to share this best practice within the team to ensure our courses become industry leaders.

Odis also stepped up to cover maternity leave this year and became a lead trainer. I watched Odis deal with some difficult situations within the team with calmness and confidence. I was new to my role and Odis was very supportive of me and the entire lead team, whilst never shying away for difficult conversations and entering into healthy debate at our team meetings.

Odis is simply a totally selfless, energised, creative, positive and dedicated trainer who feels responsible for not just delivering his job well, but beyond that, to explore how he can make a difference to the lives of others and making that happen. A true inspiration to everyone who meets him and very deserving of this award.“