How to Develop Training for Smaller Businesses

[Md. Anikuzzaman]

When your business has under ten employees, chances are your training budget is next to nothing and time allocated for training is non-existent. New hires may be welcomed cheerfully, but all too often they are left to figure out their jobs.

Small companies also have trouble finding the money and time to boost the skills of their long-term employees. It's not for lack of caring, it's just impossibly hard to fit it in and still keep up with production or service skills.

Here are five things your small company can do to train staff more effectively:

1. Determine what skills all new employees should have and develop a process for ensuring that it happens. A senior employee may be delegated to handle training, for example, or a procedural manual developed. It is important to have consistency, so time invested now in setting up this process will pay off later. Ensuring that keeps things short and simple. This will prevent taking your employees away from completing essential aspects of their job by breaking down their skills training into bite-size pieces. Remember, only focus on the essential skills.

2. Determine the skills your current employees need to take their work to the next level. There is no point in investigating training programs before you know what you are looking for. If you have less than ten employees, write their names and one skill that they should be learning for their growth in the future. This area should be personalized because each employee will learn differently and at a different rate. Skills vary and therefore the necessary training may be different. Using an e-learning technology, it will be easy to customize each learning plan that fits each skill style.

3. Take the skills and look for the most cost and time effective way to transfer them to the employee. You might find an online course, or even a free course at your local library or community college. If everyone needs to learn the same skill, it might be more time effective to bring a trainer for one morning and just build that into the production schedule. However, since you are a smaller company and therefore, more likely to have each employee possessing a different skill, a customized learning plan may be more suitable for you.

4. Set up a mentoring program in the form of mini-teams in your company where members who don't have certain skills are mentored by those who do. As a study by S.M. Martin and S.K. Sitters published in the "Children and Youth Services Review (2012)" showed that when an organization supports a mentoring program, it is more likely to be successful on both the part of the mentor and mentee. Mentors showed more confidence in their training abilities when they were asked by their organization to take on that role and they reported the experience was mutually beneficial.

5. Train informally once every two months as a brown-bag lunch program. Bring in speakers from the community who foster innovation and personal development, or invite a speaker from your industry association to talk about trends. Ask your staff what they are interested in learning about and try to match the lunch guest to their ideas.

The key for training small businesses is using all the resources you have available to you, as effectively as possible. Since resources are limited, planning is also a critical component for small businesses so you can ensure your efforts are not being wasted. Just remember that any effort and time put into your employees will allow you to reap the benefits of its success for the future.

Source: https://trainingindustry.com/articles/strategy-alignment-and-planning/how-to-develop-training-for-smaller-businesses/