Thomas Ebert is in the business of bridge building. But rather than steel
and concrete, he lays the crucial bricks of training between ability and potential
for thousands of employees across America.
"There's a definite gap to be filled in the leap from education to
the workplace," says Ebert, president and CEO of a training firm in Minnesota.
"Employers are spending billions of dollars to fix the mismatch between their
needs and the training coming out of high schools and colleges today."
Ebert refers to this "front-line workplace training" as the biggest trend
in the training management field today. It includes teaching employees everything
from computer skills and upgrades to sexual harassment awareness. With over
3,000 of these "basic trainees" expected to come through Ebert's company's
doors this year, such work makes up most of its many contracts.
"Employers are realizing that personnel from all levels of their organizations
need training to better suit the actual working world," says Ebert. "We're
enlisted to give them a better understanding of how their companies operate,
and how they should or shouldn't behave in a corporate environment."
Organizations are also using training to hold on to more employees. Research
by the Saratoga Institute, a think-tank which does surveys on human resources
issues, suggests that companies with good training have a turnover rate of
only 12 percent. That's compared to 41 percent in companies without much
of a training budget.
"Training tends to be a top issue in whether employees are retained or
not," says Dave Egan, founder and vice-president of provider strategies for
an online training resource. "Employee retention and turnover are key issues
for companies, and they're willing to pay for it. The costs involved
with training are seen as a necessary evil."
Zlatica Roman created her job by selling her training expertise to her
current employer. She now travels around to different bank branches to make
sure tellers are all working on the same page.
"I have to combine remedial training [training those already skilled] with
those I'm starting from scratch with," says Roman. "It's a challenge,
but it's important that what the company wants, the company gets from
its employees.
"If no one heeded the rules, if everyone worked with their own way of doing
things, the number of customer complaints would be horrendous -- customers
would be served differently from one day to the next, given different services,
it would be very confusing. So employees have to be trained to work under
the same banner."
As companies continue to take training more seriously, some are building
their own training infrastructure -- corporate universities owned and run
by an organization to educate its employees. Other trends include the creation
of a new senior-level role -- chief learning officers, who come up with a
company's training strategies and carry them out.
"Organizations are empowering themselves by building broader training agendas,"
says Egan. "They're looking to find ways of making training more manageable
and effective. This can include all sorts of training modes, from online courses
to the classroom, books, tapes and videos and seminars."
While there are many solutions to training problems, companies first need
to figure out what those problems are. Richard Battaglia, executive director
of the International Society of Performance Improvement in Washington, D.C.,
calls this "taking a performance perspective." He says it's among the
biggest training trends being planned in boardrooms today.
"We're getting more questions about how to improve employee performance
based on informed approaches," says Battaglia. "Before you can
decide on training solutions, you have to define what the problems are. That's
often more important than training itself, and it's what organizations
need to focus on first."