When scanning job ads in Saturday’s newspapers you may notice that, in order to attract the best candidates, more and more companies offer their employees professional development (also: training and development) opportunities. Providing professional training to your employees can be a competitive advantage, but on the other, your staff may leave for a better job, taking the knowledge you paid for elsewhere. This may be the reason why some managers are reluctant to allocate funds to employee training, since there is a lack of tangible return on investment. Also, it is quite difficult to assess the benefits of the so-called soft-skills training, such as leadership skills, effective presentations, conflict management and similar. Developing and implementing professional development programmes is the task of the Human Resources Department, which combines traditional administrative personnel functions with human capital or ‘human resources’ management. The latter includes attracting, maintaining, and managing employees effectively. In order to retain staff and maximise their potential, HR departments allocate an amount of their budget to training and development.
Training can take different forms. Let us look at some of them. On-the-job training is informal training given in a normal work situation. This is the most common form of training since it normally does not require much organisation. People learn about their jobs through reading instructional manuals, talking to their co-workers and managers, dealing with clients, observing, or – to sum up – learning by doing. As opposed to on-the-job training, formal or off-the-job training is planned in advance with the aim of meeting specific learning objectives. This may be in the form of university courses, workshops, seminars, conferences or team building sessions, and typically takes place outside the normal work situation, so employees are not regarded as productive workers while in training. It can be held on-site (in-house training), or off-site (outside the company). The trainer can be from within the company or the HR department can hire an external training provider. As for the programmes, they can be tailor-made for the specific business or role, or bought off-the-shelf (classic business skills training such as negotiations, presentations, etc).
