Training: a correction is needed!!!
Even with unemployment, companies are always nagging that they can't find skilled workers, and filling a job can take months of hunting.
Employers are quick to lay blame. Schools aren't giving kids the right kind of training. But actually the real culprits are the employers themselves.
With an abundance of workers to choose from, employers are demanding more of job candidates than ever before. They want prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time.
The real problem, finding candidates to fit jobs is not like finding pistons to fit engines, where the requirements are precise and can't be varied. Jobs can be organized in many different ways so that candidates who have very different credentials can do them successfully. There are plenty of people out there who could step into jobs with just a bit of training—even recent graduates who don't have much job experience
On the other hand Employers, are worried about the willingness of employees to learn new skills. The longer employees work for a company, the less interest there is in training and career path development.
Unfortunately, our companies don't seem to do training anymore. Data are hard to come by, but we know that apprenticeship/supervisory development programs have largely disappeared, along with management-training programs. And the amount of training that the average new hire gets in the first year or so could be measured in hours and counted on the fingers of one hand. Added to the above problems there is;
Lack of flexibility – Employees get a course syllabus and an expectation to keep up with the instructor at all times, no matter what else they have going on in life.
Geographic access issues – If employees are not near the corporate headquarters, they might not even receive any formal training.
Uniform training for diverse needs – Even if employees face different challenges or have differing learning needs, everyone receives the same one-size-fits-all training.
Cost prohibitive – First you buy the materials. Then you hire the trainer. Then you pay your people for the time they are training but not working productively. Then you find out that the training wasn’t even that great in the first place, so you start the process over again.
We need to come out of the above weaknesses we are going through and convert them into opportunities. Few options can be
• Replace rigid training structures with self-paced programs that allow learners to go as fast (or slow) as needed in order to gain the most knowledge from the training course.
• Offer online alternatives to in-person training in order to open the opportunities up to staff in diverse geographic regions. This also reduces the time and expense associated with traveling.
• Allow employees to have a more selective approach to training. If they have required courses to take, also offer some additional elective-type training opportunities for the staff to target areas of interest for learning
The bottom line on training? People want a say in what opportunities they have, when the training is available, and how they want to learn. Gone are the days of mandatory training sessions and sitting in a classroom listening to a speaker drone on and on for hours on end.
Employees want to take ownership in their training opportunities. The more ownership people feel about the decisions they have to make, the more engaged they will be throughout the training process.
