Despite the current economic crisis, there is still a distinct skills shortage in the employment market. The last government-run Employer Skills survey took place in 2019 and identified a continuing trend of 13 per cent of workers that lacked sufficient skills, qualifications, or experience.
Sectors particularly affected are construction and manufacturing and skilled trades – areas that have been struggling for decades to plug a decline in new blood entering various industries and skillsets due to a lack of investment and a historic shift of focus away from the more traditional skills.
Many companies from different sectors of the economy have taken it upon themselves to introduce a more industry-centric approach to training and development.
As we progress through the 2020s, there is a growing swell of movement towards more vocational-based post-16 and post-18 study and apprenticeship-type schemes designed to specifically address this stubborn skills gap.
Running such schemes is not cheap, and while there are a number of government-backed incentives for companies to sign up for apprenticeship schemes, as you move through an organisation, those skills may be located in other areas that are not covered by government schemes and need to be privately funded.
To this end, it is important to understand the ROI, Return on Investment you need to focus on when creating a training and development programme for your organisation.
- Reduces attrition
Your workforce is like an ever-flowing pipeline. As the company grows and develops, loyal employees grow and develop alongside it. There are those workers who join, stay for a couple of years, and then leave. There are others who join at an early age and will stay there till they retire.
Recruitment to replace existing roles is a costly process – for high turnover, low-pay roles, this cost is about 16 per cent of an individual salary. The higher you progress in an organisation, the more expensive you are to replace.
Wherever your employee is on the pay grade, internal training and development is an ideal way of keeping them engaged and interested in the role and ensuring that they are developing the right skillset to follow the role through in the long term.
Studies indicate that for an employee to feel engaged and valued in the workplace – and more likely to stay – is to ensure that they are learning and developing, that they are working towards something, rather than being stuck in an endless cycle.
- Enables you to hire less experienced candidates
Implementing a wide-ranging training and development programme actually widens the pool of people that you have to select good candidates. If you are looking for an existing skillset, then this can restrict the number of people you have to choose from. Equally, you may be missing out on some really good people by eliminating them before they have even had a chance to demonstrate what they can do – even if it is not exactly what you are looking for.
So, your less experienced hires will soon develop into highly skilled people who also have other attributes that enhance your business.
- You get to train them your way
Most importantly, you get to train people in a way that is relevant and beneficial to your own particular brand and way of doing things. You can build your own protocols into the training curriculum to ensure that all participants are trained to the same standards, using the same tone of voice that reflects and enhances the overall brand proposition and value of the organisation as a whole.
The training itself can be used as an incentive to attract and recruit new employees. For many young people coming onto the employment market, if they lack academic qualifications, they may be hungry to learn new skills outside of that academic environment. Finding a company that offers training and development as part of their role gives them that chance to shine and flourish that they might not have recognised in mainstream education.
Ultimately a good training and development programme will create a workforce that is slick and efficient and is indicative of the effective nature of your organisation as a whole.
If you are looking to build your workforce through training and development, contact us for further information.
