Do You View Employee Training as a Talent Management Tool?

In today’s world of shrinking economies and diminishing labor pools, employee training can be one of your most valuable and critical talent management tools.

Say what?
Aren’t training budgets typically one of the first things you slash during an economic downturn?

Wise companies think otherwise…

If you know how to get the most out of your employee training, it can be one of your most cost effective investments, contributing to increased productivity, performance, employee satisfaction and employee retention.

So how do you ensure a return on your training investment?

Make sure you’re offering the right training.
Don’t just guess at what courses to offer based on popular appeal, or a manager’s opinion or plans. Create training plans and learning paths that address actual performance gaps and that support high-level company goals. Organizationally, you can identify the competencies and skills critical to your success, assess your employees’ performance on these and create training programs that address the gaps. Individually, you can start with an employee’s performance appraisal and identify opportunities for development based on past performance and current goals. Linking your learning management system to your performance appraisal software can make the job much easier.

Measure performance improvements.
It’s easy for a training organization or company to promise they’ll deliver training that “impacts performance”, but how do you actually validate this? The only real way is to evaluate an employee’s performance of specific competencies before and after training, in both the short and long term. Doing this can help you identify effective learning and development activities, and those with little impact so you can maximize your return on investment.

We touch on these ideas in more detail in our reference article Getting the Most out of Your Employee Training.

Will you be slashing your training budget or using it to leverage your talent?