After carrying out a number of time series forecasting methods and deciding which method was the most ‘useful’, I have concluded that Dewhurst would benefit from training their existing employees because they have a fairly constant but low labour Turnover. This will mean that Dewhurst are maximising the returns on all capital, time, as well as other resources that have been allocated to the training and development of employees already at Dewhurst PLC.
As a huge majority of Dewhurst’s employees tend to remain in their place of employment, the company does not have big expenditures on recruitment and selection and all the processes associated with it e. g. Advertising, drawing up policies, interviewing, personality tests etc. This should then influence Dewhurst to train existing employees. By training their current workforce, they will be able to ensure their employees posses the required knowledge and skills that are relevant to the operational tasks of which the company wishes them to carry out.
This way, Dewhurst can then have total control over which skills their employees receive training in and it will also save the time consuming task of searching for new staff that already have these desired skills. Once existing employees have undergone training at Dewhurst, they are then able to comprehend what is expected of them from their employers.
If Dewhurst can keep these employees at the firm, as they develop and progress through the ranks of the company in some cases, maybe becoming managers or supervisors, these employees will have a real sense of belonging within the organisation as they would have seen the company develop with the help of their input. The fact that Dewhurst has low labour turnover is a bonus with regards to motivation as high labour turnover can often cause de-motivation within a workforce, but as Dewhurst’s is low, this will not be a problem for them.
However recruiting new employees typically involves high costs, consumes vast amounts of time and it is never certain that the company will recruit the correct person who will not only fill the vacancy, but also work well with the rest of the team. Training within Dewhurst is mainly done internally with some day release courses open to employees approved of by Dewhurst. When taking into consideration the identification of needs for training, planning the training and delivering the training, there is a model known as the ‘Training Cycle’. This could be referred to in order to help achieve an effective training process.
Dewhurst recognise this however they have made a few alterations in order to make it unique to the company in a way that will accelerate achieving its own training goals and in turn business objectives. This was added to the cycle by Dewhurst. This is a short document which all managers or personnel who train the employees, should be familiar with and must read before training is implemented. This policy is regularly reviewed in order to make sure that they are using the right and most up-to-date methods. Notification is given out to all levels of staff i. e.
those who are being trained as well as Mangers, well in advance via a letter or the internal intranet system. In order for the training to be successful, if possible the training provider should have previous experience in training employees as if not executed in the correct manner, it could turn out to be waste of time for all involved costing Dewhurst a lot of money, unnecessarily. It is likely that most employees at Dewhurst will be responsible for showing someone what to do in a job at some point. However, specialised HR officers and managers are usually responsible for the training.
All training should be evaluated to establish its effectiveness. Reviewing a companies practice is always an important exercise however if a company does not evaluate how successful the training was, then they would not know how successful the course was. Evaluation should be done at several intervals-not just at the end. This would help reduce wastage in unnecessary training costs. One way in which Dewhurst attempt to get feed back from their employees is for everyone who attends internal courses to fill out an evaluation form after each session. The trainers can then use the data accumulated to continuously improve their courses.
Dewhurst do not only evaluate internal training but they also request evaluation forms to be completed by employees returning from external courses. These are obviously monitored for the same reasons that the internal programmes are. However after employees have had training whether internal or external, Dewhurst look to see what impact it has had, once they return to work. This just illustrates how far training evaluation carries on, without doing so Dewhurst would learn little from their training methods and be wasting a lot of valuable time and money.
