The commercial world is packed full of jargon, which often features a broad range of terms used to describe similar things. For example, you’ll often hear terms such as retraining, reskilling and upskilling used interchangeably in the workplace, despite the fact that there are nuances in meaning that separate these words.
More specifically, while retraining and reskilling largely refer to the teaching of new skills for an altered job role or to cope with a seismic technological shift (such as the rise of automation), upskilling compels employees to improve on their existing skills and build a deeper or broader range of abilities.
In this post, we’ll focus on the benefits of retraining, while asking how you can go about creating a viable and affordable retraining plan.
What are the Benefits of Retraining?
From an employee perspective, there’s a myriad of benefits of retraining or reskilling. Firstly, this can create more advanced and relevant skills, which in turn aids the development of an increasingly productive workforce that can adapt to changing times and trends.
This can also translate into better career prospects for each individual employee, increasing their value both to their current and future employers. This is certainly true if they’re able to learn the most in-demand skills in a particular industry, and continue their professional development in line with the wider marketplace.
As employees develop, they can also increase their job satisfaction, as they grow to feel more valued in their roles and work to a considerably higher standard over time.
For employers, there’s no doubt that retraining creates more skilled and valuable staff members. This translates into better quality services and products, whether this is the result of better human-driven working processes or increased skill sets.
Arguably, the entire process of retraining can cause employees to evaluate their methodology and lead to further improvements, particularly in their mindset and everyday outlook in the workplace.
How to Create a Retraining Plan
The question that remains is how can you go about creating a viable retraining plan for your business? Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you out.
● Create a Budget: Typically, medium and larger organizations invest anywhere between 2% and 5% of their salary budget back into retraining, while this percentage can decline markedly for smaller firms. This should only be considered as a guide, however, and you should strive to create an average training budget per employee to help manage the cost more efficiently. You may also seek out a business loan to help manage training expenses, so long as you measure this against any potential returns.
● Identify a Viable Strategy: When distributing your spend and retraining budget, we’d also recommend that you have a viable strategy and introduce this as a separate item line within your overall budget. Your strategy should also account for individual training costs, from briefing and technology expenses to materials and the requisite staff time.
● The Merits of Group Training: It’s also wise to consider actionable ways of reducing training costs, so long as these methods don’t undermine the effectiveness of the programs and systems put in place. One potential option is to roll out group training initiatives, which enable you to impart skills on a multitude of employees all at once. This can create volume discounts when outsourcing your retraining, which may be crucial when looking to reskill a large number of staff members.
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