ALT decision-making also highlights the important role played by front-line supervisory staff: managers, assistant managers, forepersons, and heads of production units. They are the ones ALT managers have to negotiate with to free up certain times and plan education and training activities, which make it necessary to remove participating employees, both those providing and receiving the training, from their production duties for a given period of time. In short, the more that training needs are dictated by production imperatives, the more that the training section must deal with production heads, whether the focus is on quality control, health and safety or changes in equipment.

As will be seen in the discussion of the "upstream" and "downstream" dimensions of ALT (chapter 5), it appears that workplaces subject to high quality control or occupational health and safety standards present a special profile, reflected in the internal organization of ALT for production staff. Thus, the companies in the case study that were subject to such pressures tended to opt for a form of organization that emphasized control and greater involvement of non HR-units, such as the quality control department.

The three sectors studied by Bélanger et al. (2004) illustrate this division of responsibilities for dealing with continuing education and training. In retail businesses, the ALT manager is often a member of the human resources department and is responsible for all ALT activities involving production employees, including upstream and downstream activities. The situation is different in sectors such as food processing and biopharmaceuticals, ^{Footnote 47} where companies are required to observe high quality control standards. In this context, the ALT manager tends above all to be responsible for monitoring activities, administering trainee records and some ALT activities of a more general nature. On the other hand, activities relating to quality control, which accounts for the largest amount of training, are usually planned and organized under the direction of the quality control office or assigned directly to a different structure reporting to that office.

Among the 15 businesses studied, there is a general trend toward a division of responsibilities linked to the organization of ALT for managers, professionals and scientists, on the one hand, and for production unit operators, on the other. ALT for managers tends to be administered in a way that is fairly similar to that for professionals, where the activities are authorized by general management but co-ordinated by the ALT or human resources department. Responsibility for ALT for operators tends to be shared by production and quality control units.

The study by Bélanger et al. (2004) shows that, generally, the unit or department responsible for ALT co-ordinates planning and, where appropriate, evaluation. It manages contracts and day-to-day activities such as monitoring expenses and reimbursing people. It is also the ALT service that normally assumes responsibility for developing and applying the company's ALT policy and the ALT regulations that come under the Ministère de la santé [Ministry of Health] or the Act to foster the development of manpower training, the so-called "1% Law."

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