Employee training essential for beating competition

Businesses must compete in the global marketplace, which is highly dominated by rapidly changing consumer needs.

As business strategies that worked out yesterday, will not be successful tomorrow, it compels each and every business organization to find and recruit employees that are able to cater for consumers especially in the manner in which others cannot do, creating competitive advantage and beating competition.

For every effort made by a competitor to be closer with consumers, other companies will incur losses, depriving themselves of market share. All these can be addressed by a group of well-trained employees. Hence, employee training is essential for beating competition in the market.

Training is a planned programme by a company to empower employees with job-related competencies. These competencies are comprised of knowledge and skills important for successful job performance. Competitiveness refers to a company’s ability to maintain and gain market share in an industry. However, new technologies, rapid development of knowledge, globalization of business, and development of e-commerce have raised the need for training without which businesses are unable to move forward. Even if current bad economic times have resulted in cuts in training and development budgets, companies need to continue to rely on efficient and effective training practices to help employees strengthen or increase their skills in order to improve or make new products, generate new and innovative ideas, and ultimately provide high quality customer service.

Background

Before a training programme is put into action, it has to be welldesigned, so that expected results will be achieved. What must be done at the beginning is to carefully select the group of employees who are going to be trained, particularly which department and then which employees in that department. It is employees whose knowledge and skills are weak and have a real need to be developed that ought to be chosen for the training. A common mistake is that employees that already have relevant competencies, are trained, wasting money and time. So, the effort is in vain. When foreign training is arranged for employees, sending one or two competent persons is more cost-effective than sending many employees to the same training. What should be done is that as soon as persons who undertook foreign training return to the organization, they should be provided with an opportunity to share their new knowledge and skills with other employees in the organization.

The training design process needs to be more systematic and flexible, so that it becomes practical and fruitful. Furthermore, there is always a gap between business strategies adopted by the organization and the level of knowledge and skills current employees possess. All the training has to do is to fill that gap, exceeding the expectations. On the other hand, other professionals in the company should assist HR executives in finding people who should be trained, as they may not be aware of the skill level of all the employees.

Implementation

Employee training needs more than a script. It needs to be put into action. A training programme can vary from organization to organization, as it is based on organizational goals. Nevertheless, the success of the entire programme will rely on the trainer selected for the programme, as it is the trainer who trains employees in the way in which business expectations are met.

Furthermore, Implementing carefully designed training programme can result in more competitive advantages in the market, educating workers about the effective use of technology, ensuring competitive edge in the market, promoting safety and health among employees, creating opportunities for career development and personal growth which is considered an important factor in retaining workers and improving productivity and profitability.

There must be a conducive environment in the organization whee trained employees can implement what they were taught. They should be provided with an opportunity to share their knowledge with peers who did not take part in the training. Employees, in implementation process, must have passion, patience and practice to implement the right strategy at the right time.

Every employee is different from the other and has unique talents which have to be identified and harnessed. Because an employee’s way of learning does never resemble those of others, conducting training programmes for a large group at once does not pave the way for reaching the expected level of productivity.

Once training is planned and then implemented, what the superiors have to keep in mind is that religious beliefs, customs of the particular race and some traditions do not clash with the way of training. If not, employees might not be fully engaged in the training session.

Outcomes

Training should always be costeffective. Effectiveness of the training can be and should be measured by employees’ behavior and performance. For training is a value addition, not only their technical know-how but also inspiring attitudes must be combined with daily operations which will ensure a higher satisfaction for consumers.

As a well-trained employee can claim for better opportunities even outside the company, the company should work for retaining employees. If a situation arises where employees that the company trained at a considerable cost, join the competitors in the industry, it is needless to say that you will experience a miserable failure. Hence, training as well as retention can be important alike. (Amila Muthukutti holds a Bachelor’s degree in

Economics from the University of Colombo and is employed by a

leading company in Sri Lanka. He can be

reached at amilasmiles@gmail.com)