The WCO, in cooperation with Japan Customs and the ROCB A/P, organized a regional workshop on Training Management from 4 to 8 March 2019 at the RTC Japan in Kashiwa, under the sponsorship of the Japanese Customs Cooperation Fund (CCF/Japan). Thirty-two (32) representatives from twenty-four (24) Member administrations, including the host administration, and 3 Human Resource experts from the WCO Secretariat and the ROCB A/P took part in this workshop. The workshop was held as part of a series of workshops on human resource management and training following the Human Resource Development workshop conducted in April 2018 in Vietnam.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Masumi Yoritaka, Managing Director of the Customs Training Institute of Japan Customs, highlighted rapid and dynamic change in the Customs business environment, and stressed the importance of enhancing Customs capacity with vision and high ethics as well as knowledge and techniques to build up firm strategy and policy through the professionalism of Customs officials.

During the course of the workshop, the participants discussed and deepened their understanding on the linkage between organizational strategy and human resource management strategy, competency framework as fundamental to competency-based training, and the importance of running training cycles in an appropriate manner.  All the Members shared their experience and challenges in implementing their training policy and framework. The participants also held intensive discussions on innovative learning and the blended approaches in the age of technology.

In the group exercises, the participants conducting mapping drills of their training frameworks and reviewed the implementation of competency frameworks and training cycles to understand the state-of-play and identify key challenges for each administration, and for the region.  In addition, participants discussed the next steps and ways to enhance further cooperation in the region based on the findings from the previous group work.  One of the suggestions made was to develop a “Compendium of Good Practices” of the Members’ training programs in the region for Members’ reference.  The ROCB A/P will follow up on this topic.