Training

Training

The definition of training, in business context, is: Organized activity aimed at imparting information and/or instructions to improve the recipient's performance or to help him or her attain a required level of knowledge or skill.

So, the primary objective of any training is to help a person attain the required knowledge or skill. Training may be necessary due to various reasons. They may be:

1.       Job / position change.

2.       Introduction of new technology, product, etc.

3.       Fresh candidates joining the organization.

4.       Deficiencies observed in employee performance.

5.       Up-gradation of employee skills for a promotion.

The training can be industry-specific or general in nature.

Effective training has many advantages such as:

1.       The processes will be perfectly carried out and re-works will be eliminated.

2.       Reliability of people, and processes improve substantially.

3.       Quality of people will dramatically improve.

4.       Employee satisfaction will improve to a large extent.

Many organizations fail to recognize the importance of training. They view the training cost as an expense and not an investment.

I will give you two appropriate examples.

I know one big organisation which has scrapped almost all the training activities. They have stopped recruiting freshers throughout the organization, to avoid training expenses. If every organization takes this stand, what will happen to the freshers coming out of colleges year after year. The fact is that, such organizations have created distinct disadvantages for them:

1.       Experienced people always come with a mindset. It is going to be very difficult to change their mindset and align them to the organization’s requirements.

2.       They have missed out an opportunity to mould people to meet their requirements. Freshers are like wet clay and they can be easily moulded to meet your specific needs.

Sometime back, while I was speaking to the CEO of another organization, I asked him one question, ”Knowing that people may leave you, why do you spend so much on training?” I got a fantastic reply from him. “It is our endeavour to help people develop their skills whether they stay with us or not!”. This organization sends people to reputed IIMs for a month training. People should really be lucky to work for such organizations.

There are also organizations which fully exploit the benefits of training. They have a separate division for training and full pledged training facility. They have full-time training programmes for their management trainees. These programmes extend to weeks or months. Interestingly, some of those organizations do not have their own manufacturing units; they manage third party units only.

Every organization must have a training budget and should impart effective training to its people.

Toyota has a fantastic system of training people. They train employees on their job under the supervision of a trainer. The training time is almost thirty times the actual time required to carry out a particular task. The employees are not allowed to work on their own unless and until they become requirement-compliant.