Why Companies Should Train their Employees

There are 3 aspects of an individual that needs to be worked on to make them suitable employees – Attitude, Skills and Knowledge.

Attitude training determines the behavioral characteristics that the employee needs to show. This differs more from role to role rather than industry to industry. Salespersons have to be hungry and persuasive. Operations teams need to be resourceful and detail-focused and senior management needs to perform as able leaders. Attitude training is best done through exposure activities, coaching and workshops, in that descending order of effectiveness.

Skills training allows the employee to perform his activities better. This typically is a combination of industry and role. While workshops and on-the-job training are the dominant modes for skills training, they are expensive both in terms of logistics and the error costs. In recent times, simulations and serious games have started finding favor on account of the spaced repetition and exploration aspects that they offer for skills training.

Knowledge training is company and function-specific for the employee. Products, policies and functional knowledge are the typical types of training that come under this bucket. This is best done over an e-learning platform due to the sheer size of content that often forms the base of the training. E-learning allows for self-paced self-selected learning which reduces the time overhead that typically is involved in such volume training. Assessments become an important part of ensuring that knowledge training has been adequately absorbed.