Do you train your staff?
What happens if you train your staff and they later leave the company? What happens if you don’t train them and they stay?
The question is highly relevant and reflects the broader issue of whether you are truly educating your staff.
We have moved away from the HR focus of the 80s and 90s, which was centered around “managing and enhancing the company’s human capital” with training as a reward system where the travel and the three-course dinners were more rewarding than the actual acquisition of knowledge. Reiterating one’s new knowledge and sharing educational materials with colleagues became a task that was often swept under the rug.
But what about the training and human capital? Are we taking care of the company’s most important resource, and if so, how do we go about it?
The idea of creating individual development plans with associated training planning was to bring structure to this task. However, it often feels more like a forced and contrived activity, as both parties are aware that it’s often just a formality to meet institutional requirements.
How do you proceed then to move forward and develop both the employees and the company?
The answer is as simple as it is apparent when you see the key to a functional strategy. The big secret is to find a balance between demand and supply.
When interest and eagerness to acquire new knowledge are coupled with the delivery of knowledge, forums, and networking opportunities, things start to happen.
Download the guide: “3 Steps to Structure Your eLearning Course into Microcourses”
The fundamental idea of digital learning is unfortunately often missed. An LMS system is purchased for the company, which is then supposed to be filled with content. It sounds as easy as the system providers proclaim – “Buy our system and your training needs are solved!”
Unfortunately, that’s not the case at all. Quite the opposite. Buying a system hasn’t helped anyone; it needs to be filled with content, managed, and operated by local experts who drive the process within the organization. Unfortunately, I see that companies’ acquisition of LMS systems instead, and counterproductively, kill all initiatives for education, extinguishing enthusiasm and the thirst for knowledge in demand for training, rather than the other way around.
Why does it happen that an LMS system, on the contrary, kills all training initiatives in the company?
This process puts a damper on the entire training initiative because it depends on;
- The company cannot develop digital courses.
- If one still attempts to do so with staff lacking the knowledge or time, the result becomes subpar.
- Purchasing pre-made courses doesn’t fit the company’s needs.
- Developing new and company-specific courses is expensive and time-consuming. The process takes so long that by the time the course is finally completed, the need for it may have disappeared.
- One cannot effectively manage an already developed and outdated course catalog.
The longer this process continues, the worse it becomes. The staff loses motivation, the training budget is spent on the wrong type of activities, the training catalog becomes hopelessly outdated, and it reinforces the negative perception of the company’s training efforts.
The sum of all this is paradoxical. The company invests money, resources, and enthusiasm in developing a system for continuous learning that leads to the fact that no one even wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole. And the consequence of this is even worse. It creates higher employee turnover because people can’t handle this outdated approach, the staff isn’t trained, and the demand stalls because there’s such a clear imbalance in what should be so simple – creating a balance between the demand for new knowledge and the delivery of the same.
Patrik Löfvin
NXT Learning