Labour resource or workforce management has been ranked as the most critical business activity for seven years consecutively by 2019 Research Gate study on HRM. Training your workers can be an all-consuming activity, costing you both time and resources. Before you go ahead and dismiss the idea of helping your employees acquire new skills, or sharpening their existing skills, consider the many ways that skill-based training can positively affect your employees and your company.
Training increases productivity. In addition to learning how to complete tasks and take on more responsibility, apprentices can learn advanced techniques that can help them complete everyday tasks more efficiently. For example, sending your bookkeeper to an advanced Excel class may help him to learn shortcuts to simplify the accounting processes or sending your management apprentice for a soft skills training.
Training reduces turnover. The workforce epidemic that is plaguing organizations from reaching its full potential is its turnover rates. When your staff does not receive guidance or faces challenges learning the nuances of new job roles and responsibilities, they feel pressurized and will likely choose to leave your company. However, they are less likely to leave if they have the opportunity to learn new skills to keep up within their industry.
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Training improves job satisfaction. Investing time and money in employees’ skills makes them feel valued and appreciated, and it challenges them to learn more and get more involved in their jobs. Higher job satisfaction ultimately results in reduced turnover and higher productivity. An alternate and rewarding way is to directly hire apprentices for highly rated skills, which will work particularly well for some industries like manufacturing, agriculture, hardware and services.
Training aids in the recruiting process. You can either hire an apprentice who is well-trained in a particular skill, who would not render additional cost to the company for training purposes, or hire someone who has a desirable candidature but lacks a specific skill. The allowance to offer training to your staff and apprentice trainees also makes your company more attractive in the eyes of potential candidates because it shows them that they have room to grow and accept new challenges. In addition, training existing staff could reduce the need to hire new staff.
Training rewards in the short and long-haul. To fit the changing demands of job roles, cultural changes, and technological efficiencies, continuous skill training is of the essence. As the saying goes, “Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you’ve fed him for a lifetime”; the merits of skill training can be experienced throughout one’s career journey despite changing jobs, industries, and geographies.
Training reduces the need for employee supervision. Not only does skill-based training teach apprentices and employees how to do their jobs better, but it also helps them work more independently and develop a can-do attitude. It is proven that essential skills pertaining to developing literacy, numeracy, analytical, and ICT skills are fundamental to be a labour force, and purposefully, they are covered in any State-approved apprentice program offered in India.
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The skills level of your workforce has a direct and measurable impact on the efficiency and profitability of your organization. According to a recent report from DATIS workforce management, due to the drop in essential skills in the lower and middle management, small and medium-sized organizations are losing lakhs of rupees each year.
Let’s look at a quick snapshot of the key advantages of Essential Skills training in a workplace:
- increase profits
- improve performance
- improve accuracy and quality
- improve communication
- comply with regulations
- improve recruitment
- retain staff
- develop good customer relations
- improve morale
- instill motivation
- creates job satisfaction
In the next four years, over one-third of skills that are considered important in today’s workforce will significantly change.
– World Economic Forum, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2016
The list of projected top 10 skills from 2015 to 2020 shows significant movement. While skills such as problem-solving and critical thinking remain in the top three, several skills in the top 10 today will disappear tomorrow. Organizations will require a broad base of both hard and soft skills to remain agile and competitive.
With employees now choosing to be rewarded for their skills rather than their position, supporting learning systems must be equally agile to support teams in hard skills, such as project management and project-based execution, and soft skills, such as personal productivity, communications, and team building.
Future-secure for the Millennial Generation
Almost half of all millennials report they receive little or no formal training and believe their skills may be inadequate in three years. Fifty-nine percent report that they are not being given development opportunities. With 75 percent of the workforce made up of millennials by 2025, organizations will need to find better ways to offer personal and professional development opportunities, as well as the right modalities and resources to support that development. One place to seek out new recruits in such a changing climate is from your state-approved apprenticeship institutes where skill training is built within their curriculum.
Build the smart staff and support your Learners
High-performing organizations know their competitive advantage is directly tied to their ability to develop and deploy their talent effectively, and access to training and skill development is how project demands are met, and eventually, business objectives are delivered. Building a knowledge repository through people, interactive sessions, discussions, debates, and workshops is how a learning solution can be established.
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Micro-learning—a way to learn fast, with small doses of actionable learning
Optimal learning is best done when you don’t feel burdened. Learning hard skills and soft skills for personal and professional development helps in meeting out individual and business goals. By developing and embracing a growth mindset, both apprentices and employees can grab more and more opportunities that come their way, which will also aid in higher levels of performance, deliverables and even help the organization thrive.
The advantages to skill training and development have received nation-wide interest, which inspired the flagship scheme Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) from the Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship (MSDE) that aims at benefitting 10 million youth by 2020.
