Upgrading Your Workforce

One of the main responsibilities of human resources departments is to create and maintain a better workplace. Upgrading the workforce entails a number of activities that should accommodate the ergonomic and physical needs of employees. It should also entail the creation of a more collegial work environment to enhance skills, creativity, well-being and general satisfaction levels among the employees.

While human resources strategy differ depending on the type of organization, work force size and the current business environment, efforts to upgrade the workforce should essentially focus on improving employee motivation, well-being and engagement of  majority of the employees in meeting the set organizational goals and aims.

What should be done?

Training Needs Assessment

Upgrading your workforce starts with identifying the performance needs, knowledge, abilities and skills of a group of employees. This process can prove may prove effective to small and mid-sized organizations. It is an important activity since it helps in the identification and allocation of adequate resources needed to achieve organizational mission, improve quality of products and services as well as the general productivity of the firm. Need assessment also helps to identify the existing gaps between current performance and the expected future performance thus helping the firm to position itself appropriately.

Levels of a Training Needs Assessment

Organizational assessment: This involves evaluating the level of organizational performance through identifying the technical skills or experience, knowledge and abilities required in the organization. This process entails understanding the internal and external environment and how it determines the market position of the firm. Organizational needs assessment creates a new understanding of the changes in the political, technological, demographic, social, cultural and economic aspects of the society.

Occupational assessment: This entails a critical examination of the existing occupational opportunities and gaps in relation to the skills, abilities, and knowledge of a certain group of employees. At this level, new mechanisms for eliminating such discrepancies are identified and implemented.

Individual assessment: This involves looking at the individual performance of each employee and analyzing some of the strong points and capacity to the present job status. This is important since it helps to identify training needs of your employees.

Work skill training

While workforce training is expensive, when such a process is well-designed and executed, it can positively impact on the competitive success of the organization. The training needs of each employee should be identified and assessed in terms of their importance to the organization. Encouraging strong interpersonal relationships among staff and management can help to foster the outcomes of training sessions. This is because, such activities offer an opportunity where employee opinions, skills and talents are recognized and valued by the rest of the team.

Executive training

One of the main purposes of executive training is to enhance promotion opportunities for the employees. Providing ongoing training and development opportunities within the organization can help the employees to do better. Executive training also helps the employees to collaborate through networking hence creating an environment of mutual trust, confidence, job satisfaction, innovation and a sense of job security.  

Track your career path and training needs with www.sains2u.com

There are several benefits to conducting a Training Needs Assessment in advance of embarking on a training program.

A customized Training Needs Assessment helps to identify, assess and compare what your organization is doing with the knowledge, skills and behaviors needed to enhance its performance.

Some of the remarkable benefits include:

• Development of High Performance workplaces through engagement & participation

• Part of succession plan to identify competence, capability and potential

• Determines key performance and business needs to be addressed that will achieve results

• The development of training strategies appropriate to the organizational structure, culture and geography of the enterprise in conjunction with effective change management activity to ensure the goals of the training are delivered and achieved

• Build credibility for the development process with all stakeholders

• Demonstrate the proof of alignment between the development and HR programs, strategic objectives and operational goal

• Expert assistance with a fresh approach for innovation

• During organizational or role change, training needs analysis plays a major role in identifying competency and behavioral requirements

• In evaluation of your own recent training projects there may be a requirement for a change in initiatives which requires a fresh analysis to measure the extent to which employees have enhanced and the organization has benefited

• Earn respect of senior management for implementing solutions that make a difference

• Identification of gaps and/or existing solutions not immediately evident.

• Identification and evaluation of current performance gaps between people, strategy, behavioral and processes

Track your career path and training needs with www.sains2u.com

Having the knowledge, in addition to the corresponding set of skills, will keep any employee prepared in situations where they have to perform to the best of their ability. This is why employees—and even executives—of any business or organization should participate in work skill training, allowing them to learn the skill they need to make their business more prosperous.

Work skill training has several variations, based on the group of people undergoing general business-related instruction. For example, many employees undergo customer service training to facilitate customer satisfaction on a corporate level. Customer service training instructs employees about skills, knowledge and abilities needed to increase their company’s overall customer satisfaction.

Customer service training has several benefits, including helping a business and/or organization retain customers, increase their profits and better handle larger volumes of customers using a smaller workforce, once they’ve started training employees. With customer service training, employees can potentially learn techniques to better serve them in the workplace.

Executives also get training to learn how to better handle their positions at the top of any their business or organization. Executive training often comes in the form of executive education, programs or courses at graduate-level business schools, where executives, business leaders and function managers can learn more about their trade. 

Executive training is also taught as executive coaching; although more informal than school-based executive education, the process of executive coaching helps executives develop better leadership skills and facilitate their personal growth through coaching. The training aims to improve an executive’s performance in their workplace, eventually helping them realize their full potential as leaders of their companies.

To determine what a business and/or organization needs before employee and/or executive training can begin, a training needs assessment is generally required. Training needs assessments are mainly used to determine the performance requirements, like abilities, knowledge and skills, a business or organization-related workforce needs to prosper.

A training needs assessment mainly addresses the resources needed to fulfill the organization mission of a company, improve their workforce productivity and help them continue to provide quality products and/or services. The assessment recognizes both positive and negative conditions of a business, ensuring that both sides of their projected necessities will be addressed.

In relation to training needs assessments, training needs analysis depicts the formal process of identifying the training gap, usually determined through a training needs assessment. It’s used as a part of the system development process for a business or organization and serves the role as a bridge between available organization data, training media and its objectives. 

Track your career path and training needs with www.sains2u.com

Training Needs Assessment is often overlooked but important component of the training development process.  A Training Needs Assessment is the process by which we can determine what sort of knowledge and skills someone has that can be accomplished via some sort of learning means. It’s a way of figuring out what needs the worker has that can be met with training.

Training needs are essential because they are the first step in the training design – it’s the beginning of the design phase of training and development. But training may not always be the answer. Very often there are other non-training issues that are root causes for perceived problems.

Training Needs Assessment has to be done professionally. As an example, the employer might have engineered a new process or be rolling out a new product. As they are in the preparation phase, one area that will likely be identified is training. Someone will ask or mention, “Hey, what about the employees’ training needs?” Then the employer might start to put together a training program based on those needs. Traditionally, the employer might contact their local teaching institution and ask them to assist in this identification of training needs. However, in the current era, the employer would most likely looking for professionals who are more focused on Training Needs Assessment.

Training Needs Assessments are the entire basis for the training – without a Training Needs Assessment you have no idea if you’re even doing the right training, for the right reasons, and creating the right learning objectives. It’s a step that really cannot be skipped. It’s the very first step in creating the training – without it, there is no second step.

Track your career path and training needs with www.sains2u.com

What is On-the-Job Training? On-the-job training is a type of skill development where a person learns how to perform a specific skill-set through hands-on experience.

On-the-job training is the oldest form of training. Prior to the practice of off-site training classrooms, the only practical way of learning a job was working along side an experienced worker in a particular trade or profession—as demonstrated by the practice of apprenticeship during the Middle Ages when master craftsmen passed on skills and knowledge to novices who worked along side them.

On-the-job training focuses on the acquisition of skills within the work environment generally under normal working conditions. Through on-the-job training, workers acquire both general skills that they can transfer from one job to another and specific skills that are unique to a particular job. On-the-job training, typically includes verbal and written instruction, demonstration and observation, and hands-on practice and imitation.

In addition, the on-the-job training process involves one employee—usually a supervisor or an experienced employee—passing knowledge and skills on to a novice employee.

Track your career path and training needs with www.sains2u.com

One of the great advantages of knowing what employees’ strengths are is that organisations can align people with complementary strengths.

For example, if the organisation was attempting to please a potential customer and needed to know more about it, an employee with PR strengths could be assigned to the team involved in that exercise.

If the company wanted to get into a new market it might seek out staff with analytical strengths. Or if the executive team was aware that one member had a strategic strength, that person would be singled out to be involved in any strategic planning.

Another advantage of identifying staff strengths is that managers and staff can seek help from those they know have complementary skills. This is no longer admitting failure.

Recent research shows that:

• Employee performance is, on average, 36% higher when line managers focus their appraisals on staffs’ strengths and talents.
• Customer retention is 44% higher in companies where people are allowed to do what they do best‟ every day.
• Teams with line managers who take a strengths-based approach are 86% more effective than teams which don‟t.

SAInS works with organisations to assess employee strengths and competencies and align them with organisational goals.

Track your career path and training needs with www.sains2u.com