|
Towards the end of 2006, SkillSoft commissioned two separate surveys; one amongst senior level executives in the corporate HR community and one with over 5,000 people, all of whom were in full time employment, ranging from junior positions to managers and director level employees.
Our aim was to compare and contrast the employees’ view of training and development with that of employers. Specifically, we were looking for whether there were any synergies between what the employees wanted to learn, and the way in which they wanted to develop their skills, with the training made available to them by their organisations. Are employers out of step with the training they provide? Or are the learning needs of employees being fully met? We were also interested to see how the impact of technology was changing the way organisations were delivering their training and the extent to which this technology was being embraced by the employees. Finally, we wanted to look to the future and establish how closely the vision of the HR community matched that of the employees; are the provisions being made by organisations in line with how employees want to learn in the years ahead; or is there a disconnect in expectations?
Some of the results were surprising; and some were what we expected. There are many areas where the learning and development community has much to be proud of. Indeed, in many of the organisations we surveyed, there are some outstanding programmes in place that are making a significant and positive difference to the skills and knowledge of the workforce, which in turn is having a positive and tangible impact on the effectiveness of those organisations as a whole. In many of the organisations involved in this research there are robust competency frameworks in place to ensure their employees develop in line with the needs of their business. Interestingly though, there is little consistency in the nature of these frameworks. They range from those that are comparatively simple to those that are highly complex. However, regardless of the type of structure they have, in each case they seem to be working effectively for the organisations that use them.
Many companies have taken the conscious decision to give their employees considerable autonomy to develop their skills and have made a wide range of training available across their organisations. Line managers still have a role to play in approving the training taken but in many organisations, particularly those with e-learning, the depth and breadth of the training done is at the employee’s discretion. As a result, the competence and skills base of the organisation continues to expand and those we interviewed said the gain to their business was evident in many ways.
There was evidence of increased productivity, particularly in areas like sales, customer service and IT, as well as improvements in retention rates and in some cases, a higher level of personal job satisfaction or an increase in satisfaction with the skills of managers and other leaders.
The results also indicated that the trend towards informal learning will continue as more and more organisations understand the value that this type of learning brings. In fact, many of the organisations that participated in this study are making a concerted effort to support informal learning to exploit the benefit that it produces. In addition, there is evidence from the quantitative survey that companies are actively promoting the sharing of information amongst their staff and encouraging employees to pass on their knowledge and expertise to their peers. A large majority (73%) of the employees who participated in the research said that they were actively encouraged to share their skills and experiences with others. Yet, in other areas, we noticed that the same challenges we have seen in previous studies have yet to be resolved. The issue of time once again raised its head: 40% of those surveyed said they didn’t have time to do the training they needed. And perhaps because of this, there were a number of instances where employees had been asked to take on roles they felt they hadn’t had enough training for. IT and desktop tasks fared the worse, followed by customer service activities. And a number of employees said they had been asked to carry out tasks relating to management and leadership tasks without adequate training.
|
