How do organizations stay relevant in their industry? Through team training.

Closely following our ability to innovate is our ability to learn. When organizations support their people with strategic training and learning opportunities, they become agile, ready to respond to change or pioneer change ourselves.

How To Be Strategic About Team Training

1. Create a learning culture

Most companies that don’t engage in a lot of training blame high costs for their lack of learning opportunities. It’s no excuse! You can create a learning culture that encourages your staff members to be proactive about their growth.

Of course, there is a time cost for in-house training, but lunch and learn sessions, job shadowing, mentorship, and projects are all effective, low-cost options to up-skilling and teaching your team on a regular basis. Of course, your culture must support this learning focus. Show your staff through your practices that learning is a priority.

2. Use data to set priorities

Do you know which positions in your organisation are business-critical? Are you able to effectively identify your high performers and high potentials?

When it comes to training, you want to be conscious of return on investment. Your dollar will go furthest with the employees who are already succeeding or those who have the ability and opportunity to succeed with some support. You also want to be sure that you’re thinking about what jobs are critical to revenue generation and eliminating risk. Focusing on the employees in these business-critical roles will help you drive profits or cut costs. A great first step is to complete a SWOT analysis that will help you identify your training needs!

3. Attach learning to specific objectives

Failure to set post-training objectives is the easiest way to waste your budget. You want to make sure that the learning on which you’ve spent money has an impact to business, otherwise, what’s the point? The courses or learning your employees undertake should have an evaluation component so that you can measure their improved skills and use those to drive business results.

Your employee should have short-term and long-term goals that will demonstrate their improved abilities – go ahead and build this into your performance management process. Your finance team can help you track your training spend and may be able to give you advice on how to put a dollar figure to increased productivity that has resulted from your training.

Our team here at Connect conduct free training constantly for the Cayman community, but if you would like to organize a speciality training for your staff please do reach out to connect@nova.ky and we would be happy to help you organize something.