How do you increase your skills? Anyone’s skills? Your employees’ skills?
There really is no other way as effective as good training.
Do Your New Employees Have the Right Skills?
Whether you are hiring young adults right after completion of their education, of whatever level, hiring experienced employees, or considering promoting your existing good performers to a level of increasing responsibility and skills, you need to ensure that they have the required skills to meet the needs of their new roles.
On-job Training
One way is to let them learn by themselves, ‘on-job training’ as it’s usually called. It works, seemingly quite well. However, there is no way of knowing how effectively the employee learned and how many uncalled-for mistakes they made in the learning process. And not many companies track how much this on-job training cost the company.
And of course, on-job training is not possible in certain scenarios such as operating heaving equipment, working in hazardous areas, or any areas with high risks.
Formal Training
The other option is more formal training. Formal training does not necessarily mean a classroom-style lecture. That in itself may not be the best way (more on this in a later blog.) For one, cost tracking of such training is easier. And therefore, calculating the RIO is relatively easy as well.
Training Helps You Keep Your Employees
Training helps you keep current employees, who see any investment in them as a vote of confidence by management in them. The cost of replacing an employee is Employee retention alone is a huge benefit of training.
Gallup noted in one of their articles about the lack of training for employees in the US:
Here’s how it breaks down for an individual organization:
– The annual overall turnover rate in the U.S. in 2017 was 26.3%, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics
– The cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary — and that’s a conservative estimate.
– So, a 100-person organization that provides an average salary of $50,000 could have turnover and replacement costs of approximately $660,000 to $2.6 million per year.
Employee Training for Agility
As the world around us continues to change quickly, not only honing your existing skills but also developing new skills is becoming more and more important. Consider this insight from PWC:
Constant change is the norm. Businesses have adjusted as best they can, but when it comes to employees, many need new ways to adapt quickly and build resilience. The missing link? Creating a collaborative learning environment where your workforce can develop the skills they need to succeed today––and the skills that will drive innovation and growth for your business in the future.
Cost of Training is an Investment, Not an Expense
Consider employee training cost as an investment rather than an expense. Track the effectiveness of any such training and the resulting improvement in productivity. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the huge ROI of an effective training program.
In his book, The Greatest Management Principle in the World, Michael LeBoeuf states, “If you believe that training is expensive, it is because you do not know what ignorance costs.”
Easier said than done though! It’s hard to track how effective any given training session was.
Achieve Leadership Solution (www.achieveleadershipss.com) provides various training programs with well-documented and proven methods of tracking the effectiveness of each training program. And we offer guaranteed improvement in productivity.
Contact us to learn more about how we can increase your productivity through employee training.
