Why Is Training Important?

There are several key reasons to ensure that your staff are appropriate trained and skilled.  Perhaps the most important is that it ensures your team is better able to provide a response to your customer that is appropriate to their issue or problem.   In addition, by ensuring that your staff have the right skills, your company is better prepared for the future and will be significantly more efficient and productive.

Reasons for Employee Training

Some of the most common reasons for training and development include the following:

• Based on a performance appraisal and issues identified
• To improve a companies performance and efficiency
• To improve an employees future job prospects within the company
• To help a company deal with a new technology or tool
• To help a company obtain a specialized certification

Training Types

Generally training is split into two main categories (although these can also be combined in some fashion):

• Internal Training - Provided by the company directly, this is most common with call centers and technical support teams.  Internal training provides information about the specific company and is extremely useful to new employees trying to learn the essentials of what the business does, what products the company provides and what types of customers are serviced by the business.  Internal Training is generally provided by internal resources that have the relevant skills and this type of training can be both structured and unstructured.  Often internal training is conducted for external 3rd parties also to ensure that prospective customers understand the underlying structure of a business and what its products are able to do (and more importantly perhaps, what they cannot do!).
• External Training - External training is somewhat more structured and is generally provided by a 3rd party business or company.  This training is skill specific and is often provided if and when a business does not have the relevant skills in house.  A good example of External Training are certifications - either technical or quality related.

Training Benefits

Training has significant benefits to businesses in several different areas, most notably however with regards to employee motivation and retention.  Training is generally considered a "benefit" and those companies that provide this to their staff on a regular basis have an increased level of staff satisfaction.  Also - those businesses that provide this to their staff have a better trained and skilled workforce which translates directly into an improved level of Customer Satisfaction.

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Some Resume Essentials

Your CV and Resume is your primary tool in finding a new role.  Without having a properly formatted and targeted resume, you are not presenting yourself in the best light possible and you will lose out to others.  Spending the time now is a wise investment not only in your future but also in your career as it can set you apart from your competition and maximize the interview opportunities you will receive.

Formatting

It is essential that you format your resume to the role that you are looking for.  Management jobs should clearly be emphasized if you are applying for a management role, and similarly if you are applying for a sales executive position, you need to show and demonstrate your sales skills including revenue generation and territory growth.

Do not forget to emphasize your Customer Service and Client Management skills as most roles - regardless of the title - will be looking for these.

What Can You Do?

It is absolutely essential that you provide your readers with an idea of the skills and capabilities that you possess.  This should be a very high level statement but quite explanatory and anyone reading it should understand at a glance what you are capable of and what you bring to the table.

Please note that this statement should NOT be your personal objectives.  You should actually avoid including these in your resume entirely as those statements are what you want and not what you can DO.  The company hiring you wants to know what your skills are and how they can benefit them - not why you want the job!

Give Them Real Numbers

This is one of the most important components to your resume. You need to communicate in your resume not just what you do, but what HAPPENS when you do what you do! This technique also helps employers envision you working with them, helping them with similar challenges and issues.

Use The Right Words

Key words organized in a group called something like “core competencies” for instance, will do two things for you. It serves to potentially qualify you for more interviews, assuming those companies you are submitting your resume to use key word scanners. Second, key words. i.e., your strengths that stand alone allow the reader to view your competencies independent of any past company associated with it. This has a positive psychological effect as again, it enhances the reader’s ability to picture YOU in the position they are working to fill.

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Managing in a Matrix Structure

Matrix management is somewhat different to the standard way of managing people and processes; however for a Project Manager, this is generally the only way of getting things done. Most projects operate in some kind of a matrix environment where resources to actually get the job done are acquired and released from other teams. In this fashion, the Project Manager is able to call upon the skills and excellence of staff throughout the organization to assist him in accomplishing his project, without having to build a huge and immense team internally.

What is Matrix Management?

Matrix Management is sometimes referred to as “dotted line” management and is fundamentally different to standard line management. With matrix management, you are responsible for some elements of that person’s role, but only in how it applies to your overall project. The day to day management of that employee including salary reviews, performance and so on, still remain the responsibility of their overall line manager.

Pluses and Minuses of Matrix Management

One of the biggest pluses of Matrix management is that you are not responsible for the tedious tasks of managing people and teams. Your responsibility is to the overall project and that person is simply a resource that you are utilizing to get the job done. However this comes with a downside – as you are not their day-to-day manager and do not have any overall influence on them from a managerial perspective, there are limits to what you can get them to do.

Pluses -

• No need for line management tasks like pay reviews and disciplinary meetings.
• Clearly defined objectives (project goals) are provided with a defined completion timetable
• Your job description and focus is well defined, as is that of each of the team members
• You are able to “poach” the best and most suitable resources from other parts of the company to accomplish your objectives versus having to make do with the staff in your team

Minuses -

• Who do they listen to? Unless its very well defined, your new resource can be pulled in too many directions between the requirements of your role and the work they were doing for their manager.
• Projects have a well defined timeline and due to these time constraints there are often issues with allowing staff to have time away from the job for personal development.

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Myers-Briggs Preferences

Your type does not determine your behavior. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is simply a categorization of how you "prefer" to behave and even this is to some extent situation dependent as while someone might be a "E" type personality (i.e. Extraversian), after a full day at work and meeting/greeting/interacting with people - their inclination at the end of the day might be towards the "I" spectrum (Intraversian).

People generally have both competing types inside them at all times - the MBTI however simply describes which type is more likely during normal circumstances and which type you have a preference towards.

 

Read more here.

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