The Evolution of In-House Corporate Training

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These days, job permanence is limited to Supreme Court Justices and tenured college professors. For most everyone else, job stability is not even an expectation. Some workers find themselves going for jobs and others have the luxury of having careers. Those with jobs do what they can to provide for themselves and not much else matters. For working professionals with careers, other than salary and benefits, the opportunities to learn and develop provided by a current employer or prospective employer, is at the top of the list of factors that determines whether a worker feels satisfied and stays put or moves on.

The functional area of the Human Resources profession that relates to training was rebranded as “Human Resource Development” in 2006 by the Human Resources Certification Institute (HRCI). In her PHR/SPHR Professional in Human Resources Certification Study Guide, Anne Bogardus, SPHR defines Human Resource Development as the area that “utilizes training, development, change, and performance management programs to ensure that individuals with the required knowledge, skills, and abilities are available when needed to accomplish organizational goals.”

For the majority of small to mid-size businesses in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors, this all-encompassing definition traditionally has not been financially viable. The reality is that training was seen as something that was done to ensure the person was functional in their role and that all compliance trainings such as the standard annual harassment trainingwere completed to protect the company, not to better and develop the employees.

Your top-tier companies, those on the Fortune500, and high-tech startups grow along with their staff and because of their size and their profits have been able to provide some exciting professional development opportunities. Large global companies such as Deloitte Consulting, headquartered in New York City, will offer to pay entirely for employees seeking an MBA. Some smaller, local organizations such as Metro Credit Union in Chelsea, MA offer in-house management training programs and new supervisor workshops.

At The School for Field Studies (SFS), the global non-profit I currently work for, headquartered in Salem, MA, I have developed an interview skills workshopfor anyone that conducts interviews in the organization whether it is in the US or at our Australia, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Kenya, New Zealand, Tanzania, or Turks & Caicos locations. This type of training works on every level because the Hiring Manager benefits by having a guideline to ensure a similar structure for all candidates and the company benefits by having interviewers stick to legally-compliant questions.

According to Apple,91% of Fortune500 companies are testing or deploying devices with Apple’s mobile operating system such as iphones and ipads to their employees. Not only are they being used for customer service interactions and for sales reps on the road, they are being used in corporate learning and mobile learning. What was once cost-prohibitive because you had to fly in a third party trainer can now be provided remotely via Skype, directly to your employees on the go. There is no doubt that Steve Jobs has been one of the most influential men in modern history and his company’s inventions will continue to change the world in the foreseeable future. What starts as entertainment becomes adopted by the business world. The very same thing happened to the Internet itself. We are seeing the evolution of these technologies unfold right before our eyes. RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky,estimates that 40% of all organizations already support employee-owned mobile devices. If the employee is paying for the platform out-of-pocket, take advantage to provide content.

What companies can do given the constraints of a limited budget, is simply disseminate the information that is out there. Many of the top universities are providing academic lectures for free via Internet videos. Let your employees know about conferences, workshops, networking events. The ideal professional development package should be a combination of in-house content, third party programs, and the content being shared freely by well-known entities.

Providing training and opportunities to learn is, in a way, employee recognition. It is this feeling that the company values employee growth and development that makes a company worth sticking around for, and can encourage the retention of top talent, even if the organization isn’t otherwise perfect.

Contributor:   Michael Teichberg

Michael Teichberg is currently the Human Resources Manager at The School for Field Studies (SFS) in Salem, MA, USA, a $6M global non-profit academic institution. He can be reached at mteichberg@fieldstudies.org. Teichberg is responsible for SFS's strategic staffing, onboarding, retention, and training programs to support Headquarters, as well as field-based environmental education programs and field centers in Australia, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Kenya, New Zealand, Tanzania, and Turks & Caicos Islands. Teichberg also ensures global labor law compliance, benefits administration, and handles employee relations. 

 

   

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