Knowledge and skills development is vital to the health of organizations. We live in an information age today, and organizations are routinely valued not just on their physical but on their intellectual capital. Training is one of the chief methods of maintaining and improving intellectual capital, so the quality of an organization’s training affects its value. Untrained or poorly trained employees cost significantly more to support than well-trained employees do. Training affects employee retention and is a valuable commodity that, if viewed as an investment rather than as an expense, can produce high turns.
Training is organizational effort aimed at helping employees to acquire the basic skills required for the efficient execution of the functions for which they are hired. Development, on the other hand, deals with activities undertaken to expose employees to perform additional duties and assume positions Of importance in the organizational hierarchy. The benefits Of training and development to employees and organizations alike are numerous and include (but are not limited to) the following: 1. Workers are helped to focus, and priority is placed on empowering employees. Productivity is increased, positively affecting the bottom line. 3. Employee confidence is built, keeping and developing key performers, enabling team development and contributing to better team/organization morale. 4. Employees are kept current on new job-related information, thereby contributing significantly to better customer service. 5. Employees are updated on new and enhanced skills, with a view to aligning them to business goals and objectives. 6. After a downsizing, remaining workers are given the technical and management skills to handle increased workloads. Companies with business problems are given a fresh or unbiased professional opinion or exploration, evaluation, or critique. 8. Job satisfaction, employee motivation and morale are increased, reducing employee turnover. * Processes increase in efficiency, resulting in financial GA in. New skills and knowledge can be acquired. * Existing skills and knowledge can be enhanced or updated, enabling people to further improve proven strengths. * Weaknesses can be addressed or mechanisms put in place to compensate. * Improvements in confidence, capability and competence.
Employees feel supported and enabled in their work. * Learning is progressed to practice in the workplace. * Learning is used to improve performance at work. * Learning is shared, enhancing team performance. * Wider impact in the organization through performance improvements and the dissemination of information, ideas and networking. Innovation is increased, bringing new strength to strategies, products and the company’s capacity to adopt new technologies and methods. There are various methods organizations adopt in the training and development of their employees, depending on their needs.
They include role playing, job rotation, on-the-job training, vestibule training (where employees are trained off their regular work areas but in an environment closely resembling their work place), public classroom training, onsite training, conferences which allow employees to quickly develop skills on a number of topics, technical seminars which provide employees benefits similar to conferences but with less flexibility because of focused contents, instructor-led online training, mentoring where the skills gap to be bridged is substantial, e-learning modules which allow for employee independent earning and exercises are repeatedly done to reinforce or refresh understanding of content, and embedded learning which helps employees learn through modules built into products or equipment – embedded learning solutions are often customized to fit an organization’s requirement.
