A company is only as good as the people it keeps. That’s why it pays off to invest in your employees’ qualifications. But this has to be done carefully and with good planning. Our skills management software QualityCircle Skills and the seminar management software QualityCircle Seminars can support you as you take on this challenge.
Thoughtful planning is required to arrange further training for your employees. If you offer measures without really having a concept, they probably won’t have the effect you hoped for, and this will just result in wasted time and energy. Take your time to organize further training opportunities and make a step-by-step plan.
Before you can start selecting and implementing any further training measures, you need to determine how much need there is. If you don’t look at the status quo first, you run the risk of offering unnecessary courses or not offering ones that would be extremely helpful. Using a skills matrix to work out the need is a good idea. This provides you with an overview of the skills your employees have, and which ones are still required. QualityCircle Skills helps you with this step and shows you your employees’ strengths and training potential at a glance.
It is crucial to consider different perspectives when analyzing needs. As important as your own view of the business is, you can obtain even more information by interviewing employees and team leaders. Take future employees and tasks into consideration as well!
Now you can start to arrange the different measures. Consider what you can organize internally and where you need external help. You also have to decide how to present the measures, for example, which would be better offered as lectures, which as workshops, and which as interactive self-learning courses?
In this step, you should ask your employees’ opinions. This gives you several advantages at once because it means you get an insight into what the workforce wants, but also what is possible with internal resources. Parts of the further training could even be carried out by experts within your company.
Depending on the training measures you decide to offer, you may need to let employees know if the events are compulsory or optional for them. Sometimes there aren’t many spaces available for every option, especially if you’re enlisting the help of an external service. When making your selection, be sure to support the right people, but also keep equal opportunities in mind. Make sure you play fair to ensure you comply with the Equal Opportunity Act as well as to avoid jeopardizing a positive working atmosphere.
It’s a different situation if not enough employees are interested in these further training offers. In this case, target the people you think would benefit from these measures.
But not every option needs to have a maximum participant limit. You could offer further training in ways that all employees can participate e.g. through self-learning tools. Make these measures available to the entire workforce, for example in the form of an e-learning platform. However, ensure that all employees are aware of what measures are on offer, so they don’t miss out. In QualityCircle Seminars you can display all further training measures clearly. Employees can book courses themselves or study the content saved in the system if they want.
A training concept is never 100% complete and should be regularly evaluated and adapted. To determine whether your training plan is working, you could look at the productivity of individual employees or entire teams. Another way is to look at how much you depend on new employees or external service providers to perform certain tasks. This is a good indicator of whether the training concept is working or not. Employees who are promoted tend to be happy in their jobs, which means you can also see from employee turnover whether your measures are making a difference or not.
There are various options available to you for your training concept. You can either implement these with the help of external providers or offer them internally if the required know-how is already available in the company.
There are several factors to consider when choosing the right measures for you:
The two terms “advanced training” (German: Fortbildung) and “further training” (German: Weiterbildung) are often used interchangeably even though they aren’t synonyms:
For a balanced concept, you should make the most of both types of training in the company!
Every company can benefit from a further training concept. The measures can be scaled so well that even small companies can make use of them because they grow as the number of employees does.
In order to be able to offer a wide variety of training courses and still not lose track of everything, suitable software can make all the difference. With QualityCircle Seminars you can manage all courses, workshops and modules with just one program. In order to offer the right training to each team member, QualityCircle Skills is also recommended. The module gives you an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of each employee.
Further training measures are the management’s and human resources department’s responsibility. But these groups do not have to think up the concepts by themselves. A training plan is particularly successful when the workforce works together to compile it.
Setting up a further training or advanced training concept is not difficult and can be very flexible at the same time. Select the measures that suit your company.
