Managing a business has become increasingly complex in today’s global economy. Over the past few years, industries have become more digitized and many tasks that humans were once responsible for are now automated. With the new year 2020 dawning upon us, there has been a shift in the type of skills, talent and professional development that companies require, which will have profound implications. The job-seekers need to change their approach towards getting a head-start into their respective careers. This is why companies and their HR, these days, are focusing more on employee training and development. Workplace digitization has allowed traditional tasks to be automated and employees now need to actively engage in reskilling and upskilling in order to augment their finer talents.
Many businesses are instructing their HR these days, on investing heavily towards effective training of their existing employees. Human resources departments have taken the plunge into the key focus area by initiating various in house training and development programs. This action has stemmed from a variety of reasons – the most common ones being: to equip the employees with the relative skills they need for their job, to make sure that employees have the capability to drive their own personal growth as well as play an important part in the future growth of the company, and lastly, to acquire additional talent without hiring new recruits.
Companies today require their employees to possess multiple skills and be able to carry out different types of tasks. By training their existing employees, companies can ensure that their workforce is not only adept at technical skills, but also possesses other soft skills needed to navigate unexpected challenges in the modern organizational framework. Key competencies and skills like critical thinking ability, problem solving ability, creativity in challenging situations etc are expected of employees.
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Leaders in human resources development agree that employee training especially with regards to soft skills tops the priority charts today and will be a key focus area in the new year 2020. Even employees themselves are of the opinion that learning and development is highly beneficial to their career. A report from Linkedin in 2018, highlighted that 94 percent of employees said they would prefer to continue working in a company that willingly invests in their training and thus supports their careers, and more than 80 percent of employees who were millennials considered L&D an important requisite in a job.
However, employee training and development requires a lot of groundwork, time and money. It is not as easy as collecting learning material and delivering the same. There are a few challenges to begin with – the biggest one being time. Soft skills training and acquiring multiple skills as part of learning and development, cannot happen in a single session. Employees need to make time for the training and development programs, and many of them may find it hard to do so. Some might even not be willing to attend the training sessions. The only understandable explanation to the lack of willingness to learn on the employee’s part is that there is a sizeable gap between how the training is offered and the training methods that employees prefer. While some might prefer to learn on-the-job or at work, others might wish to learn at their own convenience and pace, yet others may choose to receive training only during times of need. HR needs to come up with a solution to bring all its employees on the same page.
Another challenge in employee training and development is the type of training material used or the content that is offered in such employee training programs. Many industries are still relying on outdated training material for their programs which is bog-standard and not up to par for the present generation of employees. The standard needs to be improvised and companies must ensure that training programs are utilizing a micro format for administering different types of training across levels and hierarchy of workforce.
Having an open source data type format for the training material can be extremely beneficial. It allows the learners (in this case the employees) to focus on the key aspects of training and learn to apply them in real life organizational scenarios. Another type of training that companies can adopt is blended learning, which is a combination of in-class and online learning and is becoming popular. When such types of learner-driven training is offered, it lets employees take away the most important values, helps them learn new skills at their own pace and develop their own personal expertise.
In the new year 2020, HR must also try its best to come up with strategies that will motivate its employees to learn in a self-driven manner. Every company has different types of employees who prefer to work and learn in their own capacity and at their convenience. The larger part of the new workforce is made up of millennials who are notorious for having strong opinions and a preference of doing things the way they want to. ‘My way or the highway’ is a common motto among the young workers. So now it is up to the HR to figure out a way to bring everyone on board with the idea of training and development either at work or on their own. For the most part, there are already tons of online open source data learning platforms that employees can use from anywhere, anytime, to brush up or learn new skills. These platforms offer a variety of courses on human resources, marketing, IT, finance and accounting, operations, design and much more.
Employers can even use the data on these platforms to improve their training professionals or teams, and gain valuable insights into how the new workforce wants to learn and how to model a program for their own employees.
The need of the (working) hour is that learning and development must be integrated into the workflow in general and at the same time be unique to the organisation with well-defined objectives, purpose and factor in long-term development of the employees and the firm.
References:
- “Employee Training And Development Is The Biggest HR Focus Area in 2019,” January 7th 2019, Jingcong Zhao
- “Training and Development – A Key HR Function,” Prachi Juneja, Managementstudyguide.com
- “The Importance of Training and Development in the Workplace,” 2020projectmanagement.com
