Organisations 'must invest in skills'
Employees must be offered training and skills development programmes regardless of wider economic conditions, the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) has said.
Paul Holme, regional skills director at the LSC, explained that the current climate made it more important for businesses to have a skilled workforce.
He added: "In times like these, companies may be tempted to cut back on investment in training and skills, yet it is vital that employers continue to invest in skills; businesses that do invest often emerge stronger and more competitive than they were before the recession."
Mr Holme also suggested that workers should be encouraged to boost their career development on their own, not just during the recession but in the longer term, in order for them to support the UK's skills base.
The comments follow the publication of a survey from Oxford Intelligence, which suggested that two-thirds of highly skilled UK workers were not putting their specialist knowledge to use.
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This posting is right on the money. So many companies face recession by cutting training programmes and deeming them "unnecessary expenditure." This is in itself a fatuous concept, as you wonder how any organisation could ever consider training "unnecessary expenditure."
In recessionary times you need to find ways to get more from what you've got; increasing productivity in all departments, and that means improving performance. If you get radical and start laying off, you not only face substantial costs in the short term, you later face the costly, time-consuming processes of recruiting, hiring, and induction as and when business recovers.
The most economical way to boost performance is solid training in relevant skills. What I'm finding fascinating in this recession is to watch small organisations continuing their training plans while the big ones slash theirs. The budgets are tight, but the business is out there.
Definately. I think the nice thing about this topic is that learning doesn't have to be expensive. There's a notion I think that to learn you have to go on training courses or to events, which are often incredibly expensive. If your company has a learning culture though then every day offers up a wealth of opportunities to learn new things.
It isn't just the LSC that are trying to push employers to ensure that these programmes stay open - but the employees themselves. Its in their best interests to have these benefits, and they'll fight for them.
Some great comment here - particularly about the fact that learning doesn't have to be expensive.
Part of the problem with larger companies is that they can become 'bloated' when times are good and therefore do actually need to cut down the workforce. An upturn wouldn't necessarily mean that you will need more staff.
The car industry as a whole (internationally) has been overproducing cars for years so something had to give eventually. I doubt that post recession it will employ so many again.
This is so true. Maintaining training and skills in down times is very important because those with good training have the skills to get work done at a more efficient and professional level. So many times I see a business cut back on qualified staff to save money and really only suffer for it in the long run. If you must run on a skeleton crew then you want to keep that crew as the best skilled team you can have. Plus keeping them updated with trends gives them a morale boost and they are more loyal and work better. It's very important to keep a strong skills base and improve on that because at the end of the recession it won't be the ones who cut back in training that are the strongest.