Strategic Training and Development Extended

Показать описание

Recognizing that learning is part of all employees’ responsibilities, both managers and peers, along with training professionals, are actively involved in helping other employees gain new skills and perspectives. This helps to reinforce the value of learning and its importance for the business.

Why is the emphasis on strategic training important? Companies are in business to make money, and every business function is under pressure to show how it contributes to business success or else it faces spending cuts and even outsourcing. To contribute to a company’s success, training activities should help the company achieve its business strategy.

A business strategy is a plan that integrates the company’s goals, policies, and actions. The strategy influences how the company uses physical capital (e.g., plants, technology, and equipment), financial capital (e.g., assets and cash reserves), and human capital (employees). The business strategy helps direct the company’s activities (production, finance, marketing, and human resources) to reach specific goals.

The goals are what the company hopes to achieve in the medium- and long-term future. Most companies’ goals include financial goals, such as to maximize shareholder wealth. But companies have other goals related to employee satisfaction, industry position, and community service.

There are both direct and indirect links between training and business strategy and goals. Training that helps employees develop the skills needed to perform their jobs directly affects the business. Giving employees opportunities to learn and develop creates a positive work environment, which supports the business strategy by attracting talented employees, as well as motivating and retaining current employees.

Business strategy has a major impact on the type and amount of training that occurs and whether resources (money, trainers’ time, and program development) should be devoted to training. Traditionally, training has been seen as an event or program designed to develop specific, explicit knowledge and skills. But managers and trainers and human resource professionals have begun to recognize the potential contribution to business goals of knowledge that is based on experience, which is impossible to teach in a training program, and they have broadened the role of training to include learning and designing ways of creating and sharing knowledge.

Strategic training and development is critical to business strategy, including identifying business strategy, choosing strategic training and development initiatives that support the strategy, providing training and development activities that support the strategic initiatives, and identifying and collecting metrics to demonstrate the value of training.