Between hiring new recruits and waving goodbye to leavers, it can be easy to overlook the ones in the middle. Or more specifically, to forget about their training. After all, the people you hire are often qualified for the job, right?
However, industries change and for your business to keep up with the times, you’ll have to invest in regular training for your employees.
A lack of opportunities
A recent study has shown that almost three-quarters of employees feel that they are not reaching their full potential because of a lack of training opportunities. In fact, another study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has uncovered that employees are given, on average, only 12 minutes of training every six months. Imagine what these employees could achieve for their companies if they were offered the right training.
Training for better performance
Training isn’t just important for career development and morale. It also impacts your bottom line. A poorly trained employee is more likely to make mistakes, which will take time and money to rectify and could ultimately lose customers and damage your reputation. Instead of spending your resources fixing problems, spend the money on training your staff properly.
Holding regular training sessions for your staff also helps your business keep on top of developing technology and new tools. This keeps your company competitive. Additionally, team members are more likely to remain with the company if they can see that they are receiving regular and valuable training opportunities. In fact, 22% of employees surveyed this year stated that they left because of poor career development. So a training program will also help you save on recruitment costs.
An attractive prospect
Having a training program can also help you attract new recruits. 76% of the elusive millennial workforce see career development opportunities as crucial. Incidentally, 90% of millennials would remain in a job for over 10 years if they could expect to regularly get promotions. What would help them achieve that? Regular training.
How to create a training program that works
It can be easy to throw a few courses on the table and call that a training program. However, to really be effective, your training program should have a few specific characteristics.
It should feature training that is relevant and useful to your workforce. You should assess your current training needs and then find ways to plug any pending or existing skill gaps. You should also speak to the rest of your company to discover what skills they would like to acquire. Obviously, you should offer courses within reason. Someone might say that they’d love to learn the art of flower arranging, but that’s going to be little to no use to a marketing agency!
Do not offer training for the sake of training. Set clear goals to achieve. These can be as simple as taking one less day to carry out the monthly accounts because of new software training the finance team has had. As an overall goal, you could set an annual goal of reducing staff turnover by XX% thanks to the training program.
Not all training needs to be done externally. You can design your own internal training program that draws on existing skills within the company. If you do outsource training, make sure to take several potential programs for a test drive before committing to one.
Training your staff isn’t something that you should ignore or leave for another time. It’s an essential part of looking after and managing a team. Look at setting up a training program today and this time next year you’ll be reaping the benefits.