Why train?

The training and development of employees is paramount to retaining them within your organisation – but it’s not as simple as placing them in front of a computer simulator

Training and development is a learning process that involves the acquisition of knowledge, concepts and rules, the sharpening of skills, or the changing of attitudes and behaviours to enhance the performance of employees. But does training contribute positively to the balance sheet of an organisation, or is it regarded as yet another expense?

Before we can answer this, let’s get a fundamental understanding of what training is to an organisation. As a SETA-accredited training provider, we understand the benefits of investing in human resources, because this is the sure way to enable you to reach your organisational goals. Goals that we all share in business today include increasing sales, improving margins, reducing overheads, increasing customer satisfaction and increasing employee engagement.

Training is an activity mostly concentrating on technical skills development which, ultimately, empowers your workforce. Implementation of technical skills and knowledge, supported by behavioural-based skills development, gives people a sense of accomplishment and that, in itself, is a huge confidence booster. Confident employees tend to perform better. If your company doesn’t see personal development as a priority, what message are you sending out to your own human capital and, more importantly, your customers?

Staff retention is also a problem that many organisations have to deal with. It’s an issue that has many contributing factors – however, you will find it always begins and ends with feeling a sense of belonging. It is never as simple as “pay them well and they will stay”. Yes, pay and perks are major contributing factors in retention; however, the sense of belonging is a basic human need that requires time and effort to nurture.

Taking the time to train and develop your staff will not only assist with retention, but improve business performance on the whole. In South Africa today, corporate training can be found in almost every corner, but it’s the delivery of said training and the understanding and ability to implement the new skills, that separates The Institute for Sustainable Risk Management (ISRM) from other service providers.

Our philosophy is simple but effective. When a need for training has been established, we help to determine the proficiency level of the learner and look at the training options available to make sure that the required learning has a role to play in helping achieve the organisational goals and add value to the business.

As a business, we help you to evaluate your past training strategies to find out if there was a benefit that was derived. Were the skills taught correctly implemented after the training was provided? Did the individual and the company benefit from the training provided?

ISRM does not believe in assisting companies to spend budgets for the sake of meeting targets – but in helping businesses to achieve goals and assisting in skills development and skills transfer for individuals, to improve the level of competitiveness for their respective fields and, to improve the competitiveness of this country in the world arena.

What makes our solutions stand out is, when we help to develop your training strategy, our delivery helps in creating a change in the way that people think. Most companies have a complete misunderstanding of how training should work, how to implement it and derive the most benefits. We offer long-term training to help learners obtain a qualification, as well as short-term training to enable an employee to eventually register for a qualification, which will help to develop a career path.

At ISRM we have learned that most organisations don’t take the time to analyse what their training needs are. We provide a training-needs analysis, which helps us to determine who needs training and what kind. We also find that organisations don’t evaluate how well employees have learned. If they do, they usually stop at the first level of evaluation – the reaction data. The general misconception is that if there is a positive reaction to the training then people have actually learned something. However, we have found that the correlation is very weak between reaction to training and actual learning. The development of your training strategy will help to determine this correctly.

We have also found that some companies think that technology will solve all training problems. They think that mobile apps or computer-based training are the solution to learning. A simulation by itself isn’t enough. A learner requires very clear and precise learning objectives, some form of measurement or assessment and regular opportunities to practise and get feedback.

Once you have a sound training strategy, it can all become fruitless if the organisation is not ready to receive the training and doesn’t provide the correct conditions so that when employees go back to their job, they have the right supervisory support, the opportunity to practise, the conditions that allow them to apply the skills just learned, and the motivation to sustain this. ISRM will assist you to set the climate for learning. Employees are very good at reading what is critical. If the organisation isn’t setting signals, people don’t use it.

Let ISRM help you define a training strategy that will take your business to the next level. Our highly trained consultants can walk you through a winning solution.