This article was featured on LinkedIn and focuses on maximising your training budget in a tight economy.
You have read or heard a million times that a company’s competitive advantage in today’s current economic climate depends on its people’s skills and talents. You have also heard platitudes like ‘people are our most important asset’ but when times are tough the first line item that gets yanked from the budget or put on hold funnily enough is always training.
This kind of thinking just doesn’t make any sense but we see it time and time again. Although many companies consider training a good investment there are others who are simply hesitant to spend money on training employees just in case they move on and take the knowledge gained elsewhere but on the flipside and think about this, what if you don’t invest in your talent and they stay…what is the impact to your organisation then?”
Internationally-renowned HR Guru Dave Ulrich said – “competent employees have the skills they need. Committed employees deploy these skills regularly and predictably”. This quote is quite apt because it means that you probably already have the talent that you need in your company so you don’t need to rush out and recruit new talent but what you need to consider is, how do you get the best out of the talent that you already have?
In a recent talent survey in the USA by talent mobility firm Lee Hect Harrison, senior executives said that only 5% of their employees have the ideal mix of skills to help achieve the company’s actual business goals and 86% of employees surveyed said that they often (62%) or sometimes (24%) feel underutilised in their jobs.
So as some senior executives continue to agonise over the bottom line and bemoan any investment in training, their employees are realising that because they aren’t being trained they may not be reaching their full potential where they are currently employed and so they start looking for employment elsewhere with someone that will train them.
Like Ourobos (the Greek symbol of infinity), think of the picture of the dragon eating his tail and creating a never-ending circle, this stand-off between management and employees over training is a vicious cycle and quite frankly someone needs to blink first and break the deadlock. In short, if companies want to progress then one of the quickest and easiest ways to make your employees feel valued is to train them.
The benefits of short training courses are literally instantaneous, if you want to make a big impact quickly then sending your staff on a university course isn’t going to show immediate results but a 2 or 3 day short course will do the trick in many cases.
When it comes to improving your employees’ skills it seems that there really is no substitute for a ‘live’ training course. By interacting with a roomful of your peers and having the opportunity to ask questions of subject matter experts really helps to cement the new knowledge learned but also makes your employees feel valued and important.
For more info about our courses, please email imogen@alusani.co.za.
