Why training is necessary in the workplace

What is the future of training and development?  My biggest predictions for the future of training and development is that more organizations are going to start making it routine for their employees.  In the past organizations have avoided the concept because they didn’t feel it was needed or a worthwhile investment.  Training, none the less employee development was a word you might have heard around the office on a regular basis.  Lately it has become a regular practice among organizations and they are starting to realize the benefits it brings to them.  Why I think it is going to only become bigger in the future, is because people are going to start to understand the different components that should be involved in a training.  Once they understand what truly is involved in a good training program, they will have a better understanding of its benefits.  Organizations are also going to have a better idea of when training is even necessary.  I think right now since training is such the thing to do, most organization are just having it to say their involved in training their employees.  Although most of the time these training programs are not developed correctly or even needed.  If businesses are going to want to retain their employees, then their idea and involvement with development will have to become a priority. 

I think the way our job duties our changing these days, they just require training to be a necessity.  These days our least skilled jobs require the employee to have some degree of knowledge that wasn’t expected of lower level positions a few years ago.  Technology is becoming a huge factor in every possible position, requiring employee to gain a sense of how to use it.  This is where the need for training comes into play for the organization.  To further develop their employees, they are going to have to accommodate the use of technology with the required training.        

Should we ever start to differentiate between management positions and leadership positions?  Should organizations start positing positions with the title Leader instead of Manager?  There is a huge difference between what a manager does and what a leader does.  So why do we typically include their duties in one position?  I know we would like for someone who has the power to supervise employees to be capable of taking on leadership traits and these traits are looked for in a managerial candidate, but not all managers make good leaders.  Personally, it is hard to have someone in authority over you who you can respect as a leader.  It makes it that much harder to take direction from them.  A leader is someone who has the capability to motivate me, encourage my efforts, and show a strong sense of support for my involvement with the organization.         

I have had several supervisors in the past that weren’t capable of producing managerial and leadership qualities.  At my previous job, my last supervisor viewed his position as manager as a way to realize all of his ideas and not feel obligated to take into consideration the opinions of others.  He saw himself in a position to control people, instead of taking opportunities to develop his employees.  As a result he had little respect from his assistant managers and very little good reception to his implemented ideas. 

Diversity is apparent in a majority of organizations today.  The employment of the organization is either very diverse or the organization contracts out work to headquarters in foreign countries.  At some point in your career you are going to have to face diverse situations.  It is becoming more and more important for us to be accepting of these notions of diversity.  Whether it is having to attend a diversity training or being sent to work in foreign divisions.  I think in today’s world, in order to be successful or place yourself in a position to advance you have to show acceptance of diversity. 

The other day I found myself angry with someone I haven’t even met before.  I was talking with some coworkers who have been in my department longer than I have about flex time the other day and how I wished it was an option.  They made me aware of how it use to be option several years ago, but certain employees were taking advantage of the luxury.  Therefore, leading the department to stop allowing employees to utilize flex time.  The lives of people today are much more complicated than what an 8-5 job allows.  We are a becoming a society of people who find themselves doing a million things at once, in what seems to be a shorter amount of time. All the stresses I incur throughout the week would be solved with just an extra hour here in the daytime or an afternoon off once a week.  Two things which would be plausible with a flex time schedule.  

Businesses today want to get more and more involved with training their employees, but may not actually be thinking about the training that is really needed.  Are they thinking about who should be involved in the training?  What strategy would be most appropriate for their purpose?  Do they even know what their training objectives are?  There is so much involved in training that sometimes it is completely forgotten about in the need just to have training. 

I am reminded of a current training implementation that is occurring in my current place of work.  There have been for some time a demand for some type of structured training to be put together for our incoming new hires.  So being put under the pressure from directors and voiced concerns, a training program was put together.  At the moment it is currently be rolled out for the first time and it is clearly lacking a strategic thought process.  The first major flaw is the lack of appropriate people involved in the training.  No higher level managers have had any say in the training or are apart of giving the training.  There was one person designated to do the training and it is quickly becoming too much for them to handle.  With this being the case, current employees are being asked to take part as trainers and having to rapidly learn the program.  The second major flaw is the objectives for the department as a whole are not clear.  There have been goals laid out for the employee, but they could appear to be more of a timeline than goals to be achieved.  They need to figure out how the program is going to be beneficial for the employee and ultimately for the department.

Emotions play a big role in the workplace.  They are something a majority of people believe shouldn’t be brought into the workplace, but after all we are humans and not robots.  I try to keep all of my negative emotions separate from what it is I do at work, but I like to work with people who are objective to allowing their emotions occasionally play a role.  Those who choose to block out all emotions come off less sympathetic and understanding of what might be going on with their fellow peers. 

The role looks play in an organization and their practices to me coincide with emotions and how they make up a company’s culture.  I have never been apart of a company whose culture was as strong as the retail company I recently left.  It was clear the type of look they wanted and the personalities their employees to have.  Everything was extremely predictable and although they were in the process of still trying to figure out their product’s identity, the company’s culture was well established.  A company’s culture plays such a strong role, because once you get sucked into it, it rules the way you conduct business.  It becomes very hard to implement ideas of your own or form opinions that are not influenced by the culture. 

We have spent sometime over the past couple of weeks understanding evalutaions.  Last week I wrote about how the articles made me start to think about how important evaluations actually are to many things.  This week the articles opened my eyes to the importance of not just having an evaluation but having a well desgined evaluation. 

When you think about, almost anyone can just put together an evaluation.  And typically they do, just because most of the time it’s sometype of requirement.  This is usually done by most who do not appreciate or understand the value of an evaluation.  As we have learned in the reading there is much more to designing an evaluation then what most recognize.  If the time is taken to consider all the points of evaluation design, we better our chances of them being effective.

Some of the elements involved in evalutation design deal with choosing the appropriate type of evaluation.  There can be so many different types, and all dependent on the situation.  There is a reasoning process behind evaluation that helps us put together an apppropriate design.   

Having a well desgined evaluation produces results, which ultimately can help with resistance to evaluation.  If we can educate others on how to develop evaluations and prove them to be effective, then a need for them can evolve.  Once a context is created for your evaluations, a better strategy can be formed. 

While reading all of the articles for this week, I couldn’t help but think about the value of evaluations.   They play a very important role in so many different fields and can hold such strong meaning.  They can help someone re-evaluate their work, access how someone is progressing at their job, or assist in redesigning programs of various natures. 

 I started thinking during my reading of what evalutations have ment to me over time.  At first I resorted to the obvious nature of evaluations, which is in the workforce.  We are constantly being evaluated at work and if we’re not, then we probably should be.  Evaluations in the workplace help determine our learning progression, give us an idea of our strengths and weaknesses, and lead our development in a direction of improvement.  They allow us as workers to gain a different perspective of our work habit than our own.  Although we may not do our own evaluations in our careers, and may not always agree with the evaluators comments, we have to understand the beneficial factor of evaluating, 

Then the next thing that came to mind concerning evaluations, was just the small but constant evaluations we make on our everyday lives.  Are we doing the right with our lives?  Am I at the right job?  Should this be my major?  We are constantly asking ourselves questions and evaluating our personal moves almost everyday.  We all have our own way of evaluating the choices we make throughout life, and what we typically ask ourselves isn’t too far off from what an evaluator may ask of a trainer’s program. 

The articles we read this week all in some form or fashion stressed the important use of evalutaions.  They have been in use for quite some time now and if done correctly can be very effective.  It is vital to create and complete an evaluation in a very developed and unbiased manner.  As discussed in parts of the articles, bad evaluations and evaluators can create unnessesary conflict.  However, if executed correctly can almost always produce positive outcomes. 

During my time in the workforce I have experienced all types of training.  I have never had a job that preferred one type of training over the other.  Every job always used a mixture of traditonal methods, along with more technological trainings.  One thing though that has remained constant  is the amount of on the job training I have had at every job.  My current job so far has been almost exclusively peer observing more experienced peer or manager.  There have been several advantages and disadvantages to this form of training.  My learning style is more hands on and training heavily concentrated on observation makes comprehension more difficult.  Another disadvantage would be that you are not always trained by just one person, at times I might be trained on the same topic by three different people.  Everyone has their own way of doing things and the process can start to get confusing.  Although, being trained by several different people can be helpful.  In the end, I’m exposed to more than one way of doing things and I can then figure out what works best for me.  For example, the other day I was being trained on a loan cancellation duty and one step I was shown required writing several different figures on each chargeback.  This step was long and took up a good amount of time.  The next day I was trained on the same process with a different person and was told that I could skip the writing step.  Self directed learning has been a very important part of my experience, especially since I don’t benefit very much from this kind of on the job training.  I have had to take the learning situation I have been put in and make it work for me.  Which means using my down time to study on my own and work on everything I have been previously taught.

I wasn’t really introduced to e-learning until I started college.  It was used by several of my professors and I was being introduced to being in classes that were heavily supplemented by this method known as e-learning.  I found it to be helpful because it was extremely accessible.  I enjoyed having access to all these materials whenever I needed them and being able to contact others in the class quickly.  Eventually I began to take courses that were solely e-learning style, and I was able to really understand this training method.  Just because the course may be done electronically doesn’t mean your learning is restricted.  I was introduced to unique training techniques and it was all at your convience.  E-learning is only going to become a more popluar way of training in the future and can be effective for organizations if they continue to develop this form of training.              

What I have really liked about the positions I have worked in is that they were constantly changing.  Nothing really ever stayed the same and just when you thought there was nothing else to learn, something familiar would completely change.  My time in retail was heavy on training, and although the topics were typically soft skill related we needed to be great at those soft skills.  Customer service was always a huge skill to have and as a manager leadership was another vital factor. 

While working for a retail company that wasn’t as established as they hope to be, there was always room for change.  We would get trained on one type of customer skill set, apply it, then receive training on a whole new outlook on customer service just months later.  Customer service represents a large portion of your company’s image and if the company wanted to change their perception then the customer service skills would have to change too.  

In the retail world, ultimately your success is determined by your sales; and along with customer service, store leadership helps drive those sales.  Similar to our customer service training, everything was heavily based on real life scenarios.  What would you do if a customer came in requesting this product?  How would you boost you store’s morale if sales were down for the month?  Transfer of training is extremely important in a retail environment and they really used this practice.  Shortly after  a training session, your skills were put to the test.  You’re observed in the scenarios you practiced and constatnly reminded of the training you received.  When given training, an outcome is expected and how you apply your training is measured a number of ways. 

While in retail I have worked in a satellite store, and in a store that was part of a group within a certain area.  The biggest advantage to working in a store that was part of a group, was that you could offer support to each other.  We were in constant communication with each other as to what training was working the best and how other things could be tweaked.  Everyone had an idea of what store’s weaknesses and strengths were, and worked well off of the ideas we constantly shared. 

A job becomes very stagnant when the learning stops.  It’s easy to become less interested in what you are doing or even care.  The application of training helps give a purpose to what you are doing and eventually makes you a better employee.          

            One the most interesting things about Kramden Computers is how there was a lack of proper training for employees who you would assume would need a great amount of training.  The production process involved in assembling computers must require a good amount of skill and understanding of the parts.  And to produce the quality of work Kramden was expecting; several other work skills would most likely come in to play.  Skills most of their employees did not posses, not because of incompetence but because of lack of training. 

            There are several reasons organizations may avoid training, but there might be two common ones that were apparent in this particular company.  Including a fear of making their employees more valuable and the lack of desire to spend money.   Through previous experience, it could be too often that a company approaches their training needs with little assessment and research of what actually needs to be trained.  In this instance, once Kramden decided to offer training they did not fully commit to the delivery of the training.  The workers were concerned the trainers were not aware of what truly occurs on the assembly lines and presented methods not feasible to everyday work.  It was apparent Kramden neglected to think about proper settings for the training and quality of instructors. 

            It is refreshing to come across a company that listens to their employee’s concerns and comments, and then takes the necessary actions.  However, there are too many companies today claiming they listen to their employees but fail when it comes to the follow through.   Employees are not just content with the fact that their bosses may occasionally ask about their concerns.  They expect to see their concerns turned into solutions.  If training efforts are going to produce positive outcomes then there cannot be a lack of an assessment. 

When I applied for my current job, I always thought that I could at least get an interview but once reaching that point I was clueless.  I didn’t have a single ounce of financial aid experience professionally or even as a student.  My experience working within a university system and customer service background eventually did land me an interview, but that is where my worries began.  When it came time to the interview process I just knew that I was going to be hammered with financial aid questions which I would not be able to answer intelligently.  To my surprise and much delight at the time, I wasn’t asked a single question pertaining to any specific financial aid skill.  The whole interview circled around what soft skills I could bring to the office and how I could apply them to the job. 

In the end they really were impressed by my soft skills and offered me the position.  I was extremely excited because I was able to land a job I didn’t think I really was qualified for technically, purely off of the soft skills I could offer.  Around two months have passed since I was hired and it is hard to believe they would hire someone solely off of the fact they are a good team player or have communication skills.  The world of financial aid is an extremely complicated one and there is a large technical aspect which needs to be comprehended to be successful. 

After having gone through several different interviews over the years, I know these specific skills are extremely valued by employers. I can’t help but wonder though if that is all an employer should be concentrating on?  However if they do, then I strongly believe in having the on the job training to backup such hiring decisions.  If an employer doesn’t have the training capabilities to train someone with great soft skills the technical aspects of their job; then you may not allow the employee to completely execute those soft skills. 

My department is currently working on changing their current approach to training.  They have recognized the need for something more structured than in the past and have started the process of a needs assessment.  Everything is still in the beginning stages but they have taken a very typical first step by surveying specific members of the organization.  Being one of the newest employees, I know I am going to be part of the training changes.  It will be interesting to see the changes to training as I continue my own training.          

In today’s working environment, who is receiving the training and who should be receiving the training appeared to be a common topic among all of the readings.  Training is a critical aspect to a successful workplace for several reasons.  It allows a company to retain top employees, produce more knowledgable employees, attracts highly valuable potential employees, and promotes a challenging atmosphere.  As we learned from the reading though, not all companies understand the importance of training or are not using it in a correct manner.

 There are several flaws that plague most businesses in the workforce today regarding training.  The first one is that they are not offering training to those who need it the most.  Most companies are concentrating their training dollars on already educated employees instead of our working class who need the training to better develop their job skill.  Employers also need to be more supporative of employee training in general.  A few things that training develops include job interest, educational growth, more productive employees, and team work.  And why wouldn’t companies want to improve training?  It allows them to be competitive by maintaining a skilled staff. 

There are several forces today influencing the workplace such as globalization and the ever present need for leadership.  In today’s modern company it isn’t unlikely to see products produced over seas or call centers based in a different country.  Afterall, it’s proven to the one of the most cost effective ways of doing business.  So what does that mean for us as employees in the US?  The first possibility is the fact that your job could quite possibly require you to move over seas.  The more your company is setting up offices in other countries, the more likely you might be asked to relocate.  Then there is the apparent need for cross cultural training.  As companies start to build foundations in foreign places, cross cultural training becomes a very important need.  It helps their current employees to become knowledgable of the other cultures they will have some contact with at some point. 

Employee development is extremely beneficial to a company.  There are several different approaches that can be taken towards employee development dependent on your management’s desired outcome.  Through assessment, development,  and evaluation; positions can be developed to promote continuing education, constant improvement, goal oriented employees, and a better experience overall.