HOW PRIORITISING EMPLOYEE TRAINING CAN HELP YOU RETAIN STAFF
Why now is the time to prioritise employee training
Did you know that 41% of UK employers have experienced increased staff turnover or difficulty in retaining employees in the past six months?
Coupled with 46% saying they face recruitment challenges, that’s making for a turbulent time in the UK’s labour market.
So what’s the key to retaining staff in 2022? Upskilling, training and development is the answer.
Lockdown learning
Many employers made sterling efforts to ensure their organisations stayed viable during 2020/21.
Research by the CIPD found that 47% of employers had offered digital webinars or virtual classrooms in the past 12 months, with 84% of them saying they had increased this provision. Some 41% had provided e-learning or online courses, with 79% saying they had increased this.
Other types of learning and development delivered by employers during the pandemic were digital content (35%), blended learning (17%) and virtual or augmented reality (14%).
All of which meant that organisations could survive in the toughest of circumstances – and staff continued to gain valuable career and personal development skills as they adjusted to the ‘new normal’.
Upskilling staff
Now, post lockdown, we’re in the middle of what’s being called the ‘Great Resignation’, or ‘Big Quit’. Many staff are leaving their jobs because they feel burned out by the pandemic, or have simply reassessed their priorities in life.
Many employers are again turning to training to stop this exodus: 44% regard upskilling existing staff as a key response to today’s recruitment challenges.
According to HR News, there are several key reasons why this approach makes sense:
Increasing job satisfaction. Training helps employees grow to fulfil their potential. They acquire the skills to develop their careers, and satisfy their human need to keep learning throughout life. Knowing that their employer has invested in them is a huge boost to their self-worth, which in turn improves their productivity.
Encouraging employee engagement. Of course, those new skills could increase their attractiveness to other employers, but by training staff, you also deepen their engagement with your company. Many will return your investment in them with loyalty to you: they become motivated to stay for the longer term.
Spotting high potential. By training staff, managers can also assess their strengths and weaknesses, and see who might have leadership potential. That enables them to create and nurture a talent pipeline: an important part of succession planning. Incentive schemes can further motivate talented employees, while training performance reviews allow managers to track progress.
Smoothing the onboarding process. Good training is essential to limit the chance of employees quitting in their first few months with your company. In fact, a well designed induction process means that you are building retention into your HR strategy right from the moment a new employee starts with your organisation.
StaffSavvy: your training platform
The StaffSavvy workplace management platform offers a highly flexible framework to deliver, manage and track your organisation’s training and exam programme.
It boasts easy-to-use features to enable you to create training levels, modules, courses, schedules, feedback forms, resource libraries, reports and much more.
Find out how to boost your organisation’s learning and development provision by booking a StaffSavvy training demo today.