In these times of economic pressure there is always the problem on how to make sure that your business succeeds, and even grows. Studies have shown that one of the most crucial factors is having employees with the right skills, after all it is the employees that carry out tasks every day and need their skills updated to match your business’s latest needs..

Research shows the training your staff may :-

  • Increase productivity and the quality of their work
  • Improve staff motivation
  • Reduce staff turnover and absenteeism
  • Improve customer satisfaction
  • and most importantly for you as a business owner – increase your profits

By choosing the right type of business training, you can make sure that your employees have the right skills for your business, and are kept up to date with best and new practices. This is applicable for all employees, right up to management level, across all departments.

You need to be aware that different people learn in different ways so by matching your training to your employees’ preferred learning methods you can speed up their learning and reduce the costs of the training. A study at Dartmouth College shows that the main ways that people learn can be split into “passive” and “active” and as you may guess, these two different ways uses different methods of training.

Passive ways of learning are :-

  • Observing
  • Interpreting
  • Questioning
  • Reviewing

Active ways of learning are :-

  • Doing
  • Exploring
  • Testing

So, for example, a person that learns best by active methods is less likely to learn by shadowing someone who is doing a particular task – they would be better off being shown what to do and then actually doing the task. In the same way, someone who learns best by passive methods will learn more by attending seminars, even online seminars, or evening classes.

Of course there are some professions where continuous professional development is the norm, the accountancy, legal and banking professions all come to mind and there are organisations that specialises in this kind of legal cpd and cpd for banking and legal webinars. Also other industries, for example IT have a need for training to keep up to date with the latest trends in software etc, being in IT it is likely that webinars would be one of the more useful tools since IT workers are less worried about using technology to access training.

There is, of course, the option of paying staff to carry out distance learning (correspondence courses) in their own time where the business pays the cost of the course (often with a restriction that the course is successfully completed). This relies on the employee spending their own time to complete the course but, if relevant and of interest, often the employee is able to do so with great success.

A final option is to take advantage of your local Business Link organisation, the one in the East of England produces a regular booklet containing seminars that last for a couple of hours during the working day and covers a wide range of topics from Sales & Marketing, Money & Finance through to Environmental Awareness.