Employee Training: A Management Perspective

By: Maj. Gen. B.K. Bhatia
Date: May 10th, 2010
Posted in: HR Best Practices, HR Technology, Human Resources | 28 Comments »

How does the management view employee training and what do they expect from it? This was a question which intrigued us; we wanted to understand how senior employees looked at the training function from a strategic perspective.

This article captures our discussions with employees in Operations, Management, HR & Training departments. We wanted to understand what companies did post the employee evaluations, during succession planning, manpower planning, recruitment and training budget allocation process.

The rest of the article discusses our approach and insights gained.

Key questions asked

1. What is the training process followed by the organization?
2. How were the training needs identified?
3. What is the number of hours of training provided on a yearly basis? Is there any standardization? Did it change for different types of employees?
4. What are typical training budgets? How are these determined?
5. What is the ratio of in-house versus external training?
6. How was training effectiveness measured?
7. Now that the economy is on an upswing, is there any change in focus on training?

Common Insights

Some of the common answers we got from our discussions are:

1. Companies consider Employee Training and Development as a Strategic Objective.
2. Training budgets vary between 0.25% to 1.25% of employee costs but we could find no correlation between the budget and the type of industry, growth projections, profitability or any other parameter. Most companies admitted to some budgetary allocations towards skill development.
3. Training was considered to be a line function with responsibility of training with departments to which the employee belonged. HR helped in implementing a training policy framework.
4. Skill based training was imparted to junior level employees and Competency & Leadership development training was imparted to middle management.
5. Job Transfers and cross-function exposure was considered to be an important training criteria for skill development.
6. Training inputs received by an employee were always examined during succession planning as well as career development.

Technology as an aid

Most executives believed that automation could be an effective enabler and help optimize the delivery. The following were the perceived benefits of automating their training function:

1. Competency and skill gap analysis help identify suitable training gaps. This could be done during or post appraisals.
2. 360 feedback surveys help in identifying leadership and competency oriented gaps.
3. Integrating Training Need Identification (TNI) with Employee Development Plans and Training budgets could help in generating effective Training Calendars
4. CBT (Computer based training) cuts the training budgets by over 70% by significantly reducing travel time.
5. Training effectiveness feedback that were filled by trainer, trainee and the line-managers may help measure benefits of training.
6. Linking of PTO (paid-time-off) with Training Nominations and Calendar would increase attendance.
7. An employee database that could capture trainings attended and no trainings attended by employees for analysis and future planning would be extremely helpful.

Automation of training management & employee development function: Organizations need an automated system to manage the training process such that compliance with the training policies is ensured and managers can plan development of their teams using real time data.

EmpXtrack is an integrated web-based solution that meets all requirements connected with Employee training & development. EmpXtrack Training Management software is also available as a stand alone module which can be interfaced with the existing HRMS of an organization.