How do I consider my team’s training requirements?

With a training plan and clarity of what training develops the skills you need, whilst considering the individuals requirements.

Training should be an integral part of your business strategy, planning and staff development. It establishes you have a culture of continuous improvement in your business.

Maximising the skills of your staff will help your business success. By providing timely and effective training you will benefit from your employees full potential and this will help improve your business performance.

When considering the training requirements of your team, we can break this into four areas.

  1. What the business is required to undertake to meet its legal obligations?
  2. What training is required to enable the business to operate effectively?
  3. What is required to develop the skills and knowledge of your individual employees?
  4. What training would support your employees motivation but not an essential need of the business?

Meeting your legal obligations may include health and safety training or the training of first aiders and fire marshals. As a food business you will need a food hygiene certificate.

The training required to operate effectively will include vehicle, equipment or machinery training. It will also include internal training covering the business systems and standard operations that exist, but are personal to your business.

The best way to assess an individual’s training requirement is to identify their skill gap with a training needs analysis.
This is usually undertaken as part of the individuals performance management review, but can be undertaken at any time.

A training need is identified when there is a gap in the existing skills and knowledge of your employee. Information to help identify the training need is usually gathered from other employees comments, management observation, customer feedback or by admission of the employee themselves.

To avoid any discrimination, I suggest you undertake such an analysis for all your employees on an ongoing basis and ensure that all employees can have access to the training you provide.

Before implementing any training programme in your business, it is important to find the training method that will suit both your business and your employees. You should consider the pros and cons for each type of training before deciding which type to use in your business. The popular options for training staff includes taking time to train someone yourself, sending staff on courses, distance learning, work based training qualifications or getting someone in to run an in house course.

Once you have decided upon the training requirements of your team it is advisable to complete a training plan for the business, which then provides you with an ongoing reference document. This training plan will cover the training requirements of all your team, the expected delivery dates for effective absence planning and will also record when the training has been undertaken. A good training plan is a useful resource to the business as it will identify any trends in the business that highlight areas for greater focus either at the induction stage or ongoing.

Each employee should also have a personal training record, which also has copies of any certification evidence. Click here to see a template for your use.

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