Wal-Mart has opened its first Training Academy in Pennsylvania on Tuesday inside a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Hatfield Township, writes Anthony Salamone for The Morning Call.

The academy is the 41st in the U.S., and it will serve around 20 stores from the Lehigh and Delaware valleys. The goal of the academy’s two-week program is to improve the core retail skills of supervisors to better run their departments.

Chris Dunn, an assistant manager and academy facilitator at the new training facility, said that the academy aims to empower workers to understand their work better and take more ownership of their jobs and the needs of their customers.

The academy is also a response to the retail giant’s critics including Making Change at Wal-Mart which is sponsored by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. It has faulted Wal-Mart for a lack of employee training for dealing with customers.

Dunn did not disagree with this assessment.

“We had a need to spend more time with associates and to help teach and train them and develop them into our future leaders,” he said. “We were at a point in the company that we were growing so fast, our talent wasn’t growing fast enough with it.”

Read more about the new training academy at The Morning Call by clicking here.

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Top photo credit: kennethkonica #WAL-MART via photopin (license)