“To be the best forklift company in Australia, we must have enthusiastic people who posses exceptional product and application knowledge and outstanding customer service skills,” says Carl Smith, Linde’s Managing Director.

“The only way we could achieve this was to create our own training programs that specifically addresses our needs. But we realised training programs alone were not going to provide the impact we were after.

“Experience has shown that training will not be effective if it is left to managers who are focused on other aspects of the business.

“The solution for Linde Australia was to create a specific Training Academy with fully qualified trainers being responsible for the development of our staff,” he said.

Linde have contracted the expertise of the Australian Institute of Management (AIM) for all customer service training. All training material and programs have been customised by AIM to be specifically focused on the materials handling industry.
While the Linde Training Academy is based at Linde headquarters in Sydney, training will be conducted wherever there is a requirement, be it in capital cities or regional centres.

In addition to sales training, Linde has also beefed-up its technical training programs investing in IC and electric forklift experts to train all field service and workshop technicians. Linde recently graded more than 120 technicians so they could link training requirements to specific territories. In addition to technical training, technicians will be trained in all aspects of customer interface.

The Linde Training Academy commenced operation in February 2005. In addition to product training, sales staff will be educated in:

• Forklift and warehouse safety
• Understanding true operating costs
• Warehouse layouts
• Warehouse productivity issues
• Racking and pallets
• Orderpicking
• Fleet management
• Supply chain efficiencies