Why the secret of business growth is employee training
With so many things vying for too few resources, businesses are understandably often looking for ways to cut costs. And it’s easy to add the expense of training to that list.
But this could be an expensive mistake. Because, while training may not be an urgent or immediately essential expense, it IS vital to the future success (and even viability) of your business.
Here are three reasons why assuming that you can’t afford to train your employees is a mistake:
- Training people doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive.
- Training is proven to be effective.
- Training contributes highly to your business growth.
If you need more convincing, here are four reasons why you should consider making investing in staff a priority for your business.
1) It attracts and retains the right people
“The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.” — Henry Ford
The man who founded and built Ford Motors must know what he’s talking about.
When hiring employees, everyone tries to find the best fit for their company. However, it’s not always possible to find the perfect candidate. Finding someone who can do the job isn’t enough; you need to hire someone who fit into the company’s culture and share its vision.
Sometimes you’ll find the perfect personality fit, but they’ll need training to enable them to do the job. And even if someone can do the job easily when you initially hire them, in order to proceed up the company ranks, or even to stay up to date on new developments, they’ll need training during their career.
When you build a company culture around learning, then the people who are always eager to learn more and grow will be the ones that you attract. These will be the people who will grow with your company and, importantly, help your company to grow with them.
With a culture of growth and learning, you won’t just attract the brightest and most ambitious candidates, but you’ll also retain them. When you invest in people and help them grow, they’ll reward you with their loyalty. And channel their own ideas and ambitions into your business.
This is why, if you continue the cycle of learning in your organization and keep creating opportunities, it is more likely that your best employees will stay for longer. So, not only will you retain the best possible team, but it will also save you the disruption and cost of losing and replacing a valuable business resource.
2) It transforms inexperienced employees
You might wonder why you’d want to hire inexperienced employees in the first place. But no one starts their career with experience. At some point even the most brilliant people need their first job – and the first opportunity to develop their talents.
People can be experienced for many reasons other than perceived incompetence, like:
- They’ve just finished college.
- They’re changing their field of work.
- They’ve had to take a break in between jobs
- They didn’t receive proper learning and training in their previous company.
If a potential employee has cleared all the competency tests, cultural congruence, personality assessments and has got the required qualification, then inexperience is no reason to pass them over.
Young, fresh minds are better learners and easily malleable. They’re smart, and don’t have any old habits that they need to unlearn. They’re a great bank slate and often eager to learn everything from soft skills to Business Process Training.
3) It creates an agile team and process
The secret to the success of any business lies in the abilities of the organization. Creating processes that are sustainable, simple, and verifiable, builds an environment of visibility and transparency.
It helps employees and managers to assess any situation that arise, and create a feedback loop which helps in immediate corrections and repairs. This helps a business to minimize any loss of time and resources through human or technical errors.
However, an organization and its processes can be only agile as its employees. And when the human variables increase in any business equation, it becomes more and more subjective and unpredictable.
In order to achieve an agile organization, It’s essential that you invest in the right training for your employees for business process.
By equipping your team with the latest market trends, technologies, and business approaches, you’re enabling them to perform their jobs and meet deadlines more efficiently. And when each person is working with more efficiency, your business will grow.
4) It builds employee engagement and satisfaction
Training courses in today’s technologically advanced world, are highly engaging, interesting, and sometimes even fun – making them more effective. And the good news is that you don’t have to invest in hiring experts to train in-house, nor pay to send your employees to another city for training.
Many eLearning course developers build tailored courses according to your specific requirements and budget; all you need to do is research and find the most compatible service. In fact, custom eLearning outsourcing has become today’s hottest trend, especially when there are courses that use fascinating technologies like Artificial intelligence, Augmented reality, Gamification and whatnot.
These methods, when combined with microlearning courses which are accessible through smartphones, are key to creating an engaging training course, building team spirit and nurturing healthy company culture.
Is that all?
No. The benefits of employee training are innumerable, and the above advantages only scratch the surface of the rewards investing in training offers businesses.
In order to get the most from your training, it’s important to measure and track the results. For example, after competency and skill-based training programs, keeping a check on employee efficiency and overall productivity can give you the numbers which show the visible effects of training. And this can be easily achieved with eLearning or LMS analytics to perfectly gauge your business growth.
So if you want to take your business to the next level – and attract and retain the best talent – it’s worth investigating which training courses will help.
Christopher Pappas is the Founder of eLearning Industry’s Network, which is the largest online community of professionals involved in the eLearning field.
Photo by NeONBRAND
