Where Should Your Training Dollars Go Now?

You don’t need me to tell you that our world is changing. Or that those changes are coming more rapidly than most of us can keep up with. Nor do you need me to tell you that the world is now fraught with unpredictability Case in point: COVID that led to The Great Resignation. Who would have thought that one up?

Where Are We Headed?

But all this change and lack of predictability is leading us – those of us in the training business – somewhere. We are all of us scrambling to address retention issues and severe skill gaps.

In 2021 Capterra interviewed 300 HR representatives in corporations across the country and found that 49% of these organizations are increasing their learning and development budgets in 2022. This, after record numbers decreased their budgets during COVID. Why is this happening? Training budgets are increasing for two primary reasons.

1. Employee Satisfaction through Upskilling– Companies are choosing to address the record numbers of employees quitting their jobs by offering upskilling, both to add value (to the company and to the employee) and increase employee satisfaction.

2. Fill Gaps by Reskilling – In a report prepared for DeakinCo, Deloitte shared their finding that soft-skill intensive occupations will account for two-thirds of all jobs by 2030. Employees in technical roles are entering the workforce today prepared for the technical hard skills but are sorely lacking in skills such as strategic thinking, collaboration, decision making, emotional intelligence, and so on. 53% of leaders surveyed by McKenzie & Company’s Global Institute, said that reskilling existing employees is the best way to close their existing capability gaps, while nearly 80 percent said that capability building is very or extremely important to their organizations’ long-term growth.

What this Means for Us

More than ever before companies are relying on training to solve the twin critical problems of employee retention and job role instability. Faced with the need to rapidly upskill and reskill large numbers of employees, many employers are turning to online learning platforms, and third-party providers for easily accessible and on-demand transferable skills training.

Before you decide if this is solution for your company, you’ll want to strategically align your plans with your company’s growth objectives and budgets. However, outsourcing learning, especially for transferable skills, can be an affordable and flexible solution to these pressing needs.

How BCR Can Help

While big, online learning platforms such as LinkedIn Learning or Degreed offer extensive catalogs and predeveloped content that addresses the need for rapid, on-demand knowledge acquisition. What these training programs don’t provide is customization of their programs to reflect things like the company culture, values, and ways of working.

So, if what your company wants is to fill capabilities gaps in a more personalized, company specific manner, have a look at BCR's course catalog. We offer a growing range of soft-skills training solutions and we customize them to reflect your company, your values, your style, and your culture. We make sure that the employee not only acquires the skills but acquires the means to apply them in their role and in the next one they occupy. Having solutions that talk directly to your company, and leverages your company’s examples and war-stories, makes the learning so much more relevant to the learner. They don’t have to translate generic material into the context of their own working environment.

Our solutions also reflect the time pressure that learners are under. We offer synchronous virtual workshops of a maximum of 4 hours, and each workshop is available as a modularized, self-directed learning solution. Learners can complete the lessons in “bite-sized” chunks around their busy schedules.

In Summary

We all know the world is rapidly changing and corporate leaders are recognizing that this environment introduces extreme skill gaps and employee retention issues that must be addressed. Training departments are addressing much of this need through outside resources. Blue Consulting and Resourcing has a ready catalog of solutions and customizes those solutions to help ensure your employees will put their newly acquired skills to work for you, not someone else. However, that you and your company plan to spend your training dollars in the upcoming years, it is paramount that a large part of those dollars address the need to add value for employees and fill essential skill gaps in the area of transferable (soft) skills. And the learning solutions need to be immediately relevant and applicable to your organization.