Training: Better for Our People, Our Business and Our Customers
The need to train people who join a company, take on a new role or earn a promotion is pretty much self-evident. But the development needs of established employees sometimes get overlooked.
When project budgets and timescales are tight, releasing productive and valuable people can be difficult. Sometimes employees can question the need for training when they’ve been ‘doing the job’ satisfactorily for some time.
But few things in business remain constant. Technology, best practice, regulations and customer expectations evolve continuously. Training and development are essential for any organisation to keep pace with a changing business environment and meet changing customer needs.
The aim of every business should always be to make incremental improvements; to continuously strive for everything a little bit better. Although we all like to think of ourselves as competent, we all have strengths and weaknesses – areas that we can build on or need to improve.
Consistent Performance
Through training, we can bring all employees up to a higher level of competence so that everyone has a high level of skills and knowledge. The strength of a chain is determined by the weakest link. Structured development ensures every person – or link – in the delivery chain is as strong as it can be.
Where weaknesses are identified (through a performance review, for example) it’s essential to provide the training that helps people to improve.
Training also reinforces consistency. This is essential in areas such as Health & Safety and quality assurance so that everyone has the same understanding of what is expected and how to deal with non-conformance.
Training is also an investment in our people. It can be as motivating as a pay rise as it is an ongoing commitment to support their development and recognises their importance to the future of the business.
The net result of all this is that we deliver a better product and better service to our customers. They then have clear expectations for what it will be like to work with our people and confidence that these standards will be met consistently. Find out more about available trainee programmes here.
