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It's time to start thinking about your training budget!

Tuesday 6th February 2018

Mandy Chippindale

If your businesses outflows are far outweighing it's inflows it is easy to opt for cutbacks...and unfortunately one of the first areas to suffer cutbacks is the training budget, this is a crucial mistake and here's why:

1. The right training program will have a plethora of benefits for a company: it increases employee engagement, retention, and productivity; it decreases the need for supervision, reduces absenteeism, improves customer service, and boosts sales.

2. Well-trained employees make less mistakes and, because they feel appreciated the training will increase their loyalty and personal performance. It will improve their own and others perceptions of them.

3. Minimising staff turnaround has to be one of the biggest benefits. If you only have a small training budget utilise this effectively. Who will benefit? You can re-train others? Use the existing skill set available to you. Get your team on-board by suggesting that they can train next year if they have missed out on this year's budget. Keep promises and maintain commitment.

4. Research the training available, this is an obvious one but not always one adhered to efficiently enough. Quality over quantity every time but we are trying to save the business money...we are 'Procurement' after all.

5. Proper training has a positive effect on employee and customer retention, sales and overall profitability. Typically 2 - 2.5% of the company's budget allocated to employee training is considered standard, if the business is seriously looking at cutbacks, it needs to look at other financial leakage areas, special freight to name one of the most obvious ones. Succession planning is the key here, training should really be non-negotiable when looking at the future of the business.