Plus, training opportunities are not Just found in external training classes and seminars. These ideas emphasize what employees want in training and development opportunities. They also articulate your opportunity to create devoted, growing employees who will benefit both your business and themselves by your provided training opportunities. Employee Training Options: Job Content and Responsibilities You can impact training and development significantly through the responsibilities in an employee’s current Job. Expand the Job to include new, higher level responsibilities.
Reassign responsibilities that the employee does not like or that are routine. Provide more authority for the employee to self-manage and make decisions. Invite the employee to contribute to more important, department or company-wide decisions and planning. Provide more access to important and desirable meetings. Provide more information by including the employee on specific mailing lists, in company briefings, and in your confidence. Prove more opportunity to straddles goals, prolepses, Ana measurements Assign reporting staff members to his or her leadership or supervision.
Assign the employee to head up projects or teams. Enable the employee to spend more time with his or her boss. Provide the opportunity for the employee to cross-train in other roles and responsibilities. Employee Training Options: Internal Training and Development Employees appreciate the opportunity to develop their knowledge and skills without ever leaving work or the workplace. Internal training and development brings a special plus. Examples, terminology, and opportunities reflect the culture, environment, and needs of your workplace.
Enable the employee to attend an internally offered training session. This session can be offered by a coworker in an area of their expertise or by an outside presenter or trainer. Ask the employee to train other employees with the information learned at a seminar or training session. Offer the time at a department meeting or lunch to discuss the information or present the information learned to others. (Make this an expectation when employees attend external training and conferences. Perform all of the activities listed before, during, and after a training session to ensure that the learning is transferred to the employee’s Job. Purchase business books for the employee. Sponsor an employee book club during which employees discuss a current book and apply its concepts to your company. Offer commonly-needed training and information on an Intranet, an internal company website. Provide training by either knowledgeable employees or an outside expert in a brown bag lunch format. Employees eat lunch and gain knowledge about a valuable topic. Some ideas include: investing in a 401(k), how to vary and balance investments, tips for public speaking, how to get along with the boss, and updates on new products hat make work easier. These opportunities are unlimited; survey employees to pinpoint interests. ) The developers and other interested employees at a client company recently put on a day long conference with lunch and all of the trappings of an external conference at a local conference center. Attended by interested employees, the conference sessions were almost all taught by internal staff on topics of interest to their internal audience.
Picture a “real” day long conference and you’ll see the opportunity. Employees were pumped up beyond belief; they learned and enjoyed the day and mined new respect for the knowledge and skills of their coworkers. Employee I railing pitons: External Railing Ana Development Especially to develop new skills and ideas, employee attendance at external training is a must. Attaining degrees and university attendance enhance the knowledge and capabilities of your staff while broadening their experience with diverse people and ideas.
Enable the employee to attend an external seminar, conference, speaker, or training event. Pay for the employee to take online classes and identify low or no cost online (and offline) training. Pay for memberships in external professional associations with the understanding that employees will attend meetings, read the Journals, and so forth and regularly update coworkers. Provide a flexible schedule so the employee can take time to attend university, college, or other formal educational sessions. Provide tuition assistance to encourage the employee’s pursuit of additional education.
Training and Development Secrets I promised several motivation and retention “secrets” relative to employee training. These are key factors in multiplying the value of the training and development you provide. Allow employees to pursue training and development in directions they choose, not Just in company-assigned and needed directions. Have your company support learning, in general, and not Just in support of the knowledge needed for the employee’s current or next anticipated Job. Recognize that the key factor is keeping the employee interested, attending, and engaged.
The development of a life-long engaged learner is a positive factor for your organization no matter how long the employee chooses to stay in your employ. Use these training options to ensure that you optimize the employee’s motivation and potential attention. 2. Failing to Provide Training or Providing Inadequate Training To comply with a wide range of laws and regulations, companies are required to show that employees not only have completed training programs but also are applying their new knowledge on the Job.
Most companies provide training to reduce the potential for a hostile work environment for employees protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (race, color, gender, religion, nationality, national origin), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (age), or the Americans with Disabilities Act (disability). For example, the U. S. Supreme Court considers sexual harassment training to be an important factor for companies that wish to avoid punitive damages in sexual harassment cases.
Employers must also train employees to comply with practices designed to prevent harassment of any class protected by Title VI’. Federal laws may require a certain under AT training noirs Ana types AT training Tort employees In CE rattan Institutes. For example, initial training for flight attendants must include how to handle passengers, use galley equipment, evacuate the airplane, and use the public address system. The safe landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River was one of the rare moments when a U. S. Passenger plane completed a forced landing without loss of life of passengers or crew.
As a result, the Federal Aviation Administration is proposing new training regulations and rules for airlines, calling for hands-on drills on the use of emergency equipment and procedures for all flight attendants. In congressional hearings, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been accused of providing inadequate training for air traffic controllers, resulting in near collisions between aircraft. As a result, the FAA has upgraded training by purchasing simulators that use voice-recognition technology and allow trainees to instruct simulated aircraft on takeoff and landing procedures in all types of weather conditions.
This allows better training of air traffic controllers who otherwise would have to wait for inclement weather to conduct on-the-Job training. Companies in health care are required to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPO); companies in finance are required to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act; and companies in the gaming industry (such as casinos) are required to rain employees on how to handle money and how to report suspicious activity. In several states, candidates interested in being hired as full-time police officers must complete approved police training.
Legislation can also require training that is related to providing a drug-free workplace (e. G. , training about drug abuse and making counseling available) and a safe workplace (e. G. , training about the handling of hazardous materials and the use of safety equipment as dictated by the Occupational Safety and Health Act). Due to recent corporate scandals, compliance examiners are now more rigorously reviewing the quality of training by evaluating whether employees understand how regulations apply to their Jobs. This has resulted in a change in the methods used for compliance training.
Traditionally, compliance training used passive learning methods such as lectures, handouts, or e- mail attachments with Powering slides. Now, companies are using training methods that enhance both learning and transfer of training?such as e-learning, Business Games, and role playing?to ensure that employees not only understand regulations but can also apply them. For example, Tufts Health Plan uses a game- show format for awareness training, and Ho-chunk Casino uses scenarios to teach casino employees specific behaviors to watch for 3. The SOOT analysis is a valuable step in your situational analysis.
Assessing your firm’s strengths, weaknesses, market opportunities, and threats through a SOOT analysis is a very simple process that can offer powerful insight into the potential and critical issues affecting a venture. Strengths Strengths describe the positive attributes, tangible and intangible, internal to your organization. They are within your control. What do you do well? What resources do you have? What advantages do you have over your competition? You may want to evaluate your strengths Day area, sun as marketing, Atlanta, maturating, Ana organizational structure.
Strengths include the positive attributes of the people involved in the business, including their knowledge, backgrounds, education, credentials, contacts, reputations, or the skills they bring. Strengths also include tangible assets such as available capital, equipment, credit, established customers, existing channels of distribution, copyrighted materials, patents, information and recessing systems, and other valuable resources within the business. Weaknesses Note the weaknesses within your business. Weaknesses are factors that are within your control that detract from your ability to obtain or maintain a competitive edge.
Which areas might you improve? Weaknesses might include lack of expertise, limited resources, lack of access to skills or technology, inferior service offerings, or the poor location of your business. These are factors that are under your control, but for a variety of reasons, are in need of improvement to effectively accomplish your marketing objectives. Opportunities Opportunities assess the external attractive factors that represent the reason for your business to exist and prosper. These are external to your business. What opportunities exist in your market, or in the environment, from which you hope to benefit?
These opportunities reflect the potential you can realize through implementing your marketing strategies. Opportunities may be the result of market growth, lifestyle changes, resolution of problems associated with current situations, positive market perceptions about your business, or the ability to offer greater value that will create a demand for your services. If it is relevant, place time frames around the opportunities. Does it represent an ongoing opportunity, or is it a window of opportunity? How critical is your timing? Opportunities are external to your business.
If you have identified “opportunities” that are internal to the organization and within your control, you will want to classify them as strengths. Threats What factors are potential threats to your business? Threats include factors beyond your control that could place your marketing strategy, or the business itself, at risk. These are also external – you have no control over them, but you may benefit by paving contingency plans to address them if they should occur. A threat is a challenge created by an unfavorable trend or development that may lead to deteriorating revenues or profits.
Competition – existing or potential – is always a threat. Other threats may include intolerable price increases by suppliers, governmental regulation, economic downturns, devastating media or press coverage, a shift in consumer behavior that reduces your sales, or the introduction of a “leap- frog” technology that may make your products, equipment, or services obsolete. What situations might threaten your marketing efforts? Get your worst fears on the table. Part of this list may be speculative in nature, and still add value to your SOOT analysis.
I en Implications The internal strengths and weaknesses, compared to the external opportunities and threats, can offer additional insight into the condition and potential of the business. How can you use the strengths to better take advantage of the opportunities ahead and minimize the harm that threats may introduce if they become a reality? How can weaknesses be minimized or eliminated? The true value of the SOOT analysis is in bringing this information together, to assess the most promising opportunities, and he most crucial issues. 1 . Knowledge. Our competitors are retailers, pushing boxes.
We know systems, networks, connectivity, programming, all the Value Added Resellers (Bars), and data management. 2. Relationship selling. We get to know our customers, one by one. Our direct sales force maintains a relationship. 3. History. We’ve been in our town forever. We have the loyalty of customers and vendors. We are local. 1 . Costs. The chain stores have better economics. Their per-unit costs of selling are quite low. They aren’t offering what we offer in terms of knowledgeable selling, but heir cost per square foot and per dollar of sales are much lower. . Price and volume. The major stores pushing boxes can afford to sell for less. Their component costs are less and they benefit from volume buying with the main vendors. 3. Brand power. Take one look at their full-page advertising, in color, in the Sunday paper. We can’t match that. We don’t have the national name that flows into national advertising. Opportunities 1 . Local area networks. Lana are becoming commonplace in small businesses, and even in home offices. Businesses today assume Lana are part of normal office work.
This is an opportunity for us because Lana are much more knowledge and service intensive than the standard off-the-shelf PC. 2. The Internet. The increasing opportunities of the Internet offer us another area of strength in comparison to the box-on-the-shelf major chain stores. Our customers want more help with the Internet and we are in a better position to give it to them. 3. Training. The major stores don’t provide training, but as systems become more complicated with LANA and Internet usage, training is more in demand. This is particularly true of our main target markets. 4. Service.
As our target market needs more service, our competitors are less likely than ever to provide it. Their business model doesn’t include service, Just selling the boxes. Threats 1 . The computer as appliance. Volume buying and selling of computers as products in boxes, supposedly not needing support, training, connectivity services, etc. As people think of the computer in those terms, they think they need our service orientation less. 2. The larger price-oriented store. When they have huge advertisements of low prices in the newspaper, our customers think we are not giving them good value.
