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.