Are companies getting back into employee development?
"For the first time in three years, U.S. companies boosted the size of their training staffs in 2010, according to The Corporate Learning Factbook 2011, produced by research firm Bersin and Associates in partnership with Workforce Management. The average increase was 6 percent to 5.3 staff members for every 1,000 learners."
http://www.workforce.com/section/training-development/feature/special-report-training-more-learn/index.html
It's not a huge shift, but it's certainly a move in the right direction. Are you seeing similar changes at your company?
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Our training budget remains (albeit slightly reduced) but there is a far more focussed approach now. Anybody wishing to apply for training identified through their annual review, or otherwise, needs to present a business case and demonstrate how the training will develop/improve the business.
Any requested training that has a demonstrable business benefit will be considered and supported.
I've often wondered about the whole training process in companies. It does seem as though the approach you mention is very much the norm, ie that the individual has to take the iniative and research the training they want, then sell it into the company. Instances of the company taking the iniative and using a persons annual review to suggest training they could benefit from seems much less common.
I wonder why that is? The latter for me would send a much stronger signal that the company was investing in me.
To be fair to my company, it has been very proactive toward training until recently. Effectively, if training had been identified at annual (or interim) review, the case was generally that it was provided.
Luckily, Mott MacDonald is employee-owned and is able to take a longer-term view than many of our publicly traded competitors so we can still offer training albeit in the more focussed manner highlighted above.
I'm personally a great believer in training during a recession as it provides a great platform as the economy picks up (much as in the same way I consider it crass to cut advertising budgets at the first sign of trouble..........). We do still have our online learning portal that offers many free courses and ways to improve but it is expected that employees will undertake this learning in their time in the current climate.
Yes, it's by no means an extensive sample I'm drawing from, it just got me thinking. There was the thread a few days ago about the best managers of younger people being akin to teachers and it struck me as spot on. Teachers don't ask the student to request to learn maths, they believe maths is what they need to know, so teach them it. I think HR should be a lot more proactive than they seem to be in many companies, especially if the whole 'people are our biggest resource' mantra has even an inkling of truth to it.
Great to hear you have an online learning portal though. What kind of things does that contain?
The portal is fantastic - it contains anything from MSOffice skills (basic, intermediate, advanced) through to PRINCE II Foundation (which I've enrolled on myself), AutoCAD, management training, accounting, HR, touch typing, interviewing skills etc. - basically just about anything that a business or individual requires.
There are also many that have a classroom component and these generally have a cost associated both in time lost by the employee when doing the training and to the business unit for the cost of the trainer/accommodation – hence are subject to the business case scenario.
Even better, any employee can access the portal from home over a standard web connection so they can enrol and do any course at any time if they are personally driven and want to improve.
Sounds fantastic. I've been a keen fan of knowledge management ever since uni, and the portal you mention seems to cover the formal, explicit type knowledge you get from courses, documents and so on. Do you have much to cater for the more informal knowledge that's shared via conversations, observations etc.?
That's always a difficult one Adi.
We do have online discussion groups for just about everything so we can share knowledge across the company (world). For instance, I needed some info on repairs to historic bridges a couple of weeks back so I posted a comment on the bridges discussion group and received responses from the USA, India as well as the UK. I have made use of, and contributed to, many other discussions too. As well as sharing knowledge it's a great way of developing our internal company network.
Capturing the more informal, intangible stuff is probably something that every firm aspires to but we rely a lot on people sharing that info with their managers and peers - are you aware of any system(s) created to capture this type of info that works well Adi?
Quite a nice article here on internal knowledge markets. Thought it'd be of interest.
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/improvisations/2011/01/19/learn-about-interna...