Keen students of organisational success have been blessed with the discovery of the mother lode after the Learning and Skills Council published a chart detailing the roles of all 88 of the human resources geniuses who keep the funding body ticking over.

Credit for uncovering this among the tidal wave of documentation produced by the LSC goes to Edexcel’s Nick Linford, a man so dedicated to understanding the baffling world of FE funding that you can find him on Twitter tearing into statistical first releases even on a Friday evening.

And so what have we learned? That successful organisations have to ensure that staff are motivated with an attractive and competitive package of salary and benefits.

After all, you need a reason to get up in the morning and wreck the educational maintenance allowance programme, splurge pound;2.3 billion on the first people to ask for it and prepare for your impending abolition.

To this end, the LSC’s HR department includes a head of reward, whose task it is to oversee a grand total of two employees. One imagines the tykes are quite a handful and we hope the reward honcho is suitably er rewarded.

We have also learned that people need all the help they can get. It’s not enough to have an executive assistant for the HR business development manager. You had better have a personal assistant for the executive assistant for the HR business development manager, just to be on the safe side.

And finally, we learn the importance of sticking together. The LSC has lost lots of staff over the years, but it still has one HR person for every 36 other workers. Even a famously unmodernised organisation such as Royal Mail gets by with just one for every 130 members of staff.

The HR world is going through a crisis of confidence, with managers telling their trade journals that even they are beginning to doubt the value of paying people to send emails telling staff how to wash their hands. So it’s good that one organisation is still flying the flag proudly for this most essential of professions.