As the days and week pass and the lockdown continues, the FIA have been successfully running training and CPD sessions online for 3 weeks. Looking forward and thoughts turn to how the FIA will continue training once we begin exiting from lockdown. At the start of lockdown, we set out our plans that there will be no classroom training until the start of July and we would fully transition to providing our industry-leading training online where possible.

First and foremost, the health and safety of delegates and trainers is of paramount importance and we will be consulting the best, latest and most relevant health and science advise before making any decisions about classroom-based learning. If the government begins to ease the lockdown rules and it becomes possible to run classroom training in June, the FIA have decided that it would only take place at Hampton.  This is allowing us to control the environment that the training is held in and ensure that the safety of delegates and trainers are prioritised.

There are a number of measures we can put in place to help classroom-based return to the safe learning environment that we all remember. For instance, we can do this by restricting the numbers within a classroom and halving the size of our normal classes to about 10-12 per course. Understandably, this number can change over time in line with the government’s recommendations.

As we would not want anyone around the country or our international delegates to miss out on training they wish to take, we will still be running the training online to cater for those who can’t travel to Hampton. 

In the best-case scenario, we would hope that classroom-based training around the country would be available from July onwards, but as always, we will follow all the recommended guidelines before implementing a full classroom-based training programme.