Corporate training positions your company for future growth

Open your wallet

Those members of the corporate training firm remained in the
offices for a couple of days. They wanted to follow every lead and turn over
every stone. They wanted to find out what had happened to the sales team after
that apparently disastrous training and development session. And the technology
company executives had no problem paying to keep them around. They wanted to
find out what happened, too.

Do you want to keep your top employees after the job market
opens again? Do you want all of your employees to be happy and to enjoy their
work right now? Investing in training and education is an important part of
helping you do just that. The average business spends about $1,060 on training
and education per employee per year, according to research by ASTD.

“That’s an average, not a recommendation,” Galagan says. “In
that pool of companies, some are large, some are small, some are government,
some are private.”

There are also effective ways to spend a little less, if your
revenue is still down or if you opt to not invest as much in training. Turning
toward local colleges and universities to design a custom program for your
employees is often less expensive than sending them to open enrollment courses,
as are distance learning and online courses. Some businesses opt to look within
for employees who are experts in a specific area and can train the rest of the
staff.

“Some of the trends that we’ve seen are that companies have
been opting for more customized programs rather than sending employees to open
programs, which are more generic,” Kahn says. “When budgets are tight, you see
an emphasis on more customized programs that are tailored to the specific needs
of the company.”

Keep an eye on results

At last, an answer for our corporate training firm and our
technology company in the Midwest. That previous training session, as it turned
out, was not to blame for lower sales numbers. No, the culprit was instead the
fact that the technology company executives had recently installed a drastic
restructure of the compensation program. That program encouraged the sales team to try and sell only one of their
many products, and that is what
changed everything.

The training had not been the problem at all.

In fact, without that recent training session, the
technology business might have planted itself in more trouble because of the
new structure of the compensation program. The best money spent might well have
been the money spent on the training — and the worst might have been the money
that was about to have been spent unnecessarily correcting that training.

“It’s really important as you go into these programs that
you set specific goals at the beginning of the program and then monitor it say
every three months, every six months,” Kahn says. “Make sure things are still
on target and whether there’s a need to go back and reinforce certain points.”

The only way to know where you are is to know where you were.
In order to receive a more relevant return on your investment, watch the
progress from the planning stages through the training itself, then during the
months, even years, beyond.

“One of the things that’s very, very important for a company
to achieve in a competitive world is make sure they have a strong employee base
that’s constantly changing with the changing times,” Kahn says. “You want to
have ways for employees to develop their skills and move up.

“If you don’t invest in continuous learning and continuous
innovation, obviously employees are going to stagnate.”