If you want your business to be successful, you need to be able to compete in your market, and if you want to compete, you need to have skilled and capable staff.  After all, no football team will survive in the Premiership if they have players with the skills and capabilities of a Coca Cola League 2 team.

To achieve this, all businesses need to ensure that they put the right amount of effort into management training and staff development.  However, it is important that this is done within a formal and structured framework.  It is vital that employers regularly assess the training needs of their management and staff, formalise management training programmes and measure the improvement in performance against this investment.  In this way businesses can be sure that an improvement in skills is having a positive impact on the bottom line.

But how do you go about this?

The Learning and Skills Council (LSC) are currently promoting their Train to Gain programme.  The LSC is the organisation responsible for making England better skilled and more competitive, and have launched Train to Gain as way to help businesses improve their productivity and competitiveness.

Essentially the LSC will help a business to:

  • Identify the management and staff skills that it needs.
  • Pin point the right management training and staff training needed.
  • Identify and select the most appropriate training provider that will meet the businesses need.
  • Find available funding to deliver the training.
  • Review progress and impact that the management training and staff training has had on the business.

Finally, it is worth remembering that management training and staff development is also an effective way that an organisation can instil loyalty into its employees.  In this way that can ensure that they do not lose valuable staff that could have a detrimental impact on service and productivity. In fact, increasingly, employees expect to receive training in return for their effort as it is considered to be a vital aspect of their continued employment.