When implementing a training intervention in your organisation today, it is important to have a clear understanding of its purpose in the end.
Is the planned training intervention there to serve a particular purpose to benefit the company in terms of legislation, or will it benefit both the organisation and the employee intrinsically and extrinsically?
It is an unfortunate fact that HR training & development in South African organisations have been widely neglected over the past few decades.
1The lack of HR investments has resulted in low productivity, older staff members becoming more redundant, higher staff turnover, possible fear of technological advancement and may even result in an illiterate workforce.
Furthermore, in difficult economic times, the top management of organisations usually rationalise those departmental functions that do not directly generate income.
Training is often categorised in this way but if the Return on Investment (ROI) can be proven, this trend can be reversed.
A concerted effort is being made by the government and the private sector to plan better and invest more in training and development initiatives through passing certain legislation in the country.
These Acts impose upon South African employers’ certain requirements in terms of compliance pertaining to skills development within the organisation.
Employers must ensure that their view on training and development within their organisation must not be polarised in order to just comply, but rather invest in the training and development of their employees that can actually benefit both the employee and the organisation as a whole.
It is a waste to invest time, effort and money into designing and delivering a training solution that is either unnecessary or inaccurate in its focus.
Consequently, training and development should be based on needs and should be preceded by a comprehensive training and development needs analysis.
Training and development should consequently be based on needs.
Training Needs Analysis refers to the process of evaluating the organisation, individual employees and the employees’ tasks to discover precisely what gaps exist between what people know, do or feel, and what they should know, do or feel in order to perform competently.
Addressing training and development needs within your organisation can be done at certain levels:
- Micro-level
By investigating the work content and determining which competencies an employee must have in able to perform their job optimally with specific reference to knowledge and skills.
- Meso level
Here the focus is on the enterprise as a whole and addresses factors such as organisational strategy and objectives.
- Macro-level
This refers to training needs that are found both nationally and internationally.
In SA, an example of a macro level need is illiteracy.
- Mega level
Refers to needs that stem from organisational contributions that add measurable value to society and external clients, i.e. value that the organisation adds outside itself.
As it is evident above is the process of a training needs analysis important because it focuses the training effort on actual training and development needs and thereby helps to ensure that resources set aside for training are more appropriately utilised.
Moreover, when the above process is implemented properly, it will lead you to have motivated, qualified as well as loyal employees.
Taking the above into consideration with the pandemic we are currently facing with the coronavirus outbreak, the majority of businesses are hereby forced to do an urgent training needs analysis.
This is due to the lockdown forcing many companies to indefinitely close down their businesses and work remotely in order to mitigate the risk of spreading the virus.
The lockdown brought about many challenges, with training and development not being overlooked.
This led to many companies realising what needs exactly exists in the company relating to IT skills and hygiene, for example. Companies had to implement a lot of new work processes in order to adapt with the changing environment, and this essentially caused a ‘’gap’’. A gap that can only be overcome when a needs analysis is properly planned and implemented as well as evaluated afterwards.
SEESA has responded to the nationwide lockdown by adapting their training courses to remove physical face-to-face contact by offering their training courses utilising the online platform in the form of webinars.
The obvious benefit of this is that the person attending the webinar will not be exposed to other individuals and therefore minimising the risk of being infected by the virus, but also the employee will not be taken out of the workplace, therefore the company will not have to provide transport to and from the training centre. This is normally the two main reasons why training and development are put aside.
One of the largest benefits of training an employee is that it increases morale, which is now needed more than ever. The ideal time to invest in training and development is right now as this will keep your employees positive by encouraging them to develop new skills during the difficult time we are facing currently.
Should you require any Skills Training assistance please contact your nearest SEESA office.
Monray Fivaz obtained both his bachelor’s degree in Human Resource Management and his honours degree at the Nelson Mandela University (NMU) in 2017 at the age of 21. He joined SEESA in 2018 as an SDF at our Port Elizabeth branch.
REFERENCES
1Erasmus, B.J., Loedolff, P.V.Z., Mda, T.V. & Nel, P.S. (2015). Managing Training and Development (7th ed.). Cape Town: Oxford University Press.