Transferring skills in your business
Mar 8 2010 by Karen Dent, The Journal
IN business, it is essential that you ensure your workforce possesses the right skills to drive your enterprise forward.
Skills development can seem like a costly exercise, and as companies emerge from the downturn and work to maintain a competitive edge, investing in staff may not be part of their immediate plans. However, transferring the skills that exist in your company can be an effective way of delivering staff training.
Transferring skills within your businesses refers to utilising the expertise of existing staff members and calling upon them to deliver training to other employees. Transferring skills can have real advantages to a business.
Not only will the member of staff delivering the training understand your company, they will be able to use this understanding to deliver tailored, focused training that matches the exact needs of your company.
It can also be cheaper than outsourcing your training and can be timed in a way that is most convenient for you and your workforce.
The first step towards implementing this type of staff training is to look at the skills gaps that exist within your company, and identify whether or not you have a member of personnel anywhere within the business with the ability, and crucially the confidence, to deliver a training programme.
It can be useful to look at the skills of senior team members, as they will usually have the skills and authority to deliver the training programme effectively to more junior members of your workforce.
For example, a senior employee in your finance department may be best placed to tutor a more junior employee in the details of accounting software.
A new salesperson may best learn how to sell your products by receiving support from more experienced members of the sales team. It may be that training is delivered in an informal way, for instance shadowing can be an effective way of allowing new or inexperienced staff pick up tips and techniques from other team members.
As well as delivering benefits to the trainee, allowing a member of staff to deliver training to other employees can help boost morale and thereby improve productivity. However, as with every business decision, time should be taken to assess whether it is the right thing for your own business, and the needs of your staff.
It may be that using experienced employees to train others is not a cost-effective use of their time. Such in-house trainers may also be very skilled at their work but less able when it comes to communicating those skills. In addition, their knowledge may need updating and they could also end up passing on bad habits, so it is vital that you weight up the pros and cons of skills transfer for your own business, and develop a training plan accordingly.
Richard Asquith is skills advisor at Business Link
