Staff training is a continuous process of employees gaining new knowledge, mastering new skills and working methods. The constant struggle for a competitive advantage in the market has led management to understand the importance of employees’ knowledge, skills, and competencies for the successful implementation of projects. Currently, more and more companies consider the cost of training staff as a long-term investment in human capital and not as an item of undesirable personnel costs. This article will discuss the types and methods of training, and the system of evaluation of training.
Types of employees’ training
Staff training is a set of methods and approaches aimed at improving skills, developing professional skills, knowledge, competencies, and enhancing the psychological characteristics of employees and their ability to communicate. Training has an effect on the attitudes of employees which in turn makes them to perform well with proficiency (Sheeba & Christopher, 2020). Forming an effective personnel training system is usually a joint task of the company’s management and the HR department. Employees are the most valuable assets of every organization as they can make or break the organization’s reputation and can adversely affect profitability (Sendawula et al., 2018). There are three main types of personnel training: training, personnel professional development, and personnel retraining.
Staff training aims to ensure that the employee receives the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to perform specific tasks within a particular position. To provide the company with qualified employees, personnel development offices are created in the human resources of many large modern companies, including educational centers, training zones, and personnel training departments (Miroshin et al., 2017). Professional development is the company’s investment in acquiring additional knowledge and competencies by an employee due to changes in the requirements for the profession or career advancement. Gerken (2016) states that often, professional development takes place through seminars, as it is considered that knowledge needs to be updated outside the context of everyday work. Retraining of personnel is acquiring new knowledge and competencies by an employee due to a change of profession or a radical shift in the requirements within the job description.
Sometimes in a different type of training, measures for the adaptation and introduction of personnel are allocated. Its typical form is production instruction. The most common methods when hiring a new employee or changing a position: the employee is given all the necessary information to adapt to the new workplace: about the organization, department, equipment, safety, corporate culture. The main task of adaptation and introduction to the position is to get the total return from the employee as quickly as possible and enlist his loyalty to the new place of work.
Methods of employees’ training
Depending on the goals and objectives, the training process can be organized either on-the-job or partially off-the-job or on-the-job-in the workplace. As a result, staff training methods are diverse, and their choice depends on training, timing, and budget. For example, self-study, mentoring, coaching, lectures, and advanced training courses. Moreover, the employer can pay for additional higher education, conferences and seminars can be held, and practical training and business games. When employees receive bonuses in education from the employer, they will feel obligated and will try to justify the funds invested in their development (Otieno et al., 2015). This is another undoubted advantage of staff training.
Online learning is a popular learning method that creates learning portals using the capabilities of the Internet. The organization makes its training portal, where a library of training materials, books, lectures, presentations, video lessons, e-courses are uploaded. With the development of communication technologies, forms of distance learning — such as webinars and classes via Skype-are gaining more and more strength. Remote training method is used both for conducting standard advanced training programs and activities and for complete courses of higher education. Trainers and employees can communicate online, at the same time, employees get instant access to an expansive library, including databases with industry specifics.
The mentoring system involves training between team members when a more experienced employee is assigned to a less experienced employee and helps him learn specific competencies, acquire new knowledge, and experience both in the professional sphere and personal development matters. Coaching often goes in conjunction with mentoring, and the main difference is that the coach helps the employee develop and use the existing potential, which allows the employee to achieve maximum productivity. The coach can be “internal,” i.e., from the organization itself or a professional “external” coach.
An internship is a referral of an employee to work in another division of the company, located in another city or country, for a certain period to fill certain positions within the organization. Internships can also be considered as a form of staff training and development and as a form of staff rotation. In most cases, such a course of personnel is temporary — for several months to several years. When rotating horizontal movement of employees within the organization, the employee can acquire new professional experience and additional competencies.
The system of evaluation of training
Since the investment in employee training is an investment in the organization’s development, then, like any investment, its effectiveness should be evaluated. The total share of organizations that do not evaluate the effectiveness of employee training is 29%, of which 67% of organizations are part of a larger organization, and 33% operate independently (Urbancová et al., 2021). It is much easier to estimate the cost of training in physical labor (less rejection, more minor customer complaints, less overtime), and it is much more challenging to assess the effect of training in the case of mental work, internal communications, interpersonal communication.
First of all, it is needed to evaluate employees’ reactions immediately after completing the training program (the quality of the training organization, compliance with the company’s needs). The second stage will be assessing the level of qualification of the staff before the start of the training and after the completion of the course. Then, after some time, it is recommended to pay attention to the change in the employee’s behavior. Whether the employee has started to apply the acquired knowledge in practice. Finally, the results can be summarized and evaluated by adding up all the indicators obtained and observing the situation for at least two or three months. The effectiveness of the training can be measured based upon some of the elements like objective, cost, time, location, and frequency of the training (Sal & Raja, 2016). This assessment is necessary to understand how effectively the training was conducted and whether it will make a difference in the work of the trained employee.
In conclusion, employee training is an integral part of a company’s success. There are new technologies of work that need to be studied and applied in position, and there are new competitors with which companies need to compete. Therefore, training is not only an integral part of practical work but also helps employees to develop in all directions, as well as learn proper and competent communication.
References
Gerken, M. (2016). How do employees learn at work? Understanding informal learning from others in different sectors (Doctoral Thesis). Retrieved from Universitaire Pers Maastricht.
Miroshin, D., Borodina, N., Kostina, O., Suntsov, A., & Ezhova, A. (2017). Corporate personnel training system. Eurasian Journal of Analytical Chemistry, 12(7), 1237-1248.
Otieno, A. B. B., Wangithi, E., & Njeru, A. (2015). Effect of employee engagement on organisation performance in Kenya’s horticultural sector. International Journal of Business Administration, 6, 2, 1-17.
Sal, A., & Raja, M. (2016). The impact of training and development on employees’ performance and productivity. International Journal of Management Sciences and Business Research, 5(7), 1-9.
Sendawula, K., Kimuli, S., Bananuka, J., & Muganga, G. (2018). Training, employee engagement and employee performance: Evidence from Uganda’s health sector. Cogent Business & Management, 5(1), 1-12.
Sheeba, M.J., & Chistopher, P.B. (2020). Exploring the role of training and development in creating innovative work behaviors and accomplishing non-routine cognitive jobs for organizational effectiveness. Journal of Critical Reviews, 7(4), 263-267.
Urbancová, H., Vrabcová, P., Hudáková, M., & Ježková Petru, G. (2021). Effective training evaluation: The role of factors influencing the evaluation of effectiveness of employee training and development. Sustainability, 13, 1-14.