Health care and higher education. The time diary approach for management development.

Discusses a project which aimed to determine the employee development needs of Plymouth Polytechnic and Derriford Hospital NHS senior technicians. Using the time diary approach, it revealed employer and employee variance in opinions over desired managerial competences and variance in the training needs for the two organizations. In the case of NHS technicians it was possible to define areas where provision of a new training scheme would be beneficial. Their counterparts in higher education revealed a much lower degree of interest in the provision of external assistance to develop their managerial skills further. Concludes that the Polytechnic would need to implement structural changes to the work environment before introducing any new training schemes for technical staff.