Influential management consultant Peter Drucker once said, “Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.” Knowingly or unknowingly, this seems to have fit in the psyche of today’s professional. When it comes to job satisfaction or even when changing jobs, individuals these days take into account several factors besides remuneration and the opportunity to learn new skills is one of them. Thus, offering training to employees is of importance to startups and small business.
Training the Employee
Various research studies in the last few years have pointed out to the fact that many employees are leaving companies because they are not being offered anything new to learn or there is no development of skills. Imparting training to employees is not only beneficial for them but also for the organization as it can—to a certain extent—solve some of the human resources related problems. Thus, it goes without saying that as an organization it becomes imperative to ensure that employees are being trained.
Need for Training
Surveys have pointed out that most workers feel that even though they are expected to develop additional skills that would enable them to do their jobs better, only a handful of them receive support from their company. One advantage of imparting training, especially new skill-sets, is bringing down the recruitment costs for SME and startups. How?
Well, by training your employees you can cushion the effects of hiring. If you train your employees to ensure that they are capable of handling different responsibilities, they cannot only take up new roles when such an opportunity arises, they can also effectively handle crisis situations that usually require better coordination.
Training to Retain
It does not require a rocket scientist or a management guru to understand that keeping employees happy is the best way to retain them. Most businesses, especially startups and emerging companies, think of training as something that would add to the costs. But then there are always alternative, inexpensive ways of imparting training to employees.
You can use online education platforms such as Khan Academy, Coursera, and Udacity. The courses offered are free, and the only thing that you would be investing is your internet connection. You can even form study groups, and when your employees interact with the other students online, it will even boost your employer branding, thus enabling you to attract good talent.
Using your HR management system, you can also use analytics to gain insights about the employees and what kind of training they would require. At sumHR, we are now working on a way that will soon enable HR managers or admins to export the employee data, which can then be used for trends and analysis.
Thus, it is important for startups and small businesses to offer training. It could be any type of training – job-related, skills upgrade, or even a hobby.
Feel free to use the comments section below to share the training practices in your organization.
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