I haven’t been an employee for nearly thirteen years now. As a freelancer I don’t employ staff either. I know a lot of people who do and my own workplace experience confirms my belief that employee training offers huge benefits to staff and the business as a whole.
Employee Training Benefits: The Employee’s Perspective
In the time before freelancing my career path looked very different. I help a senior support management role in the health and social care sector. I’ve always been keen to learn and expand my knowledge base but this was not necessarily something employers felt was important. One manager did and encouraged and pushed and facilitated a number of employee training opportunities, including a counselling qualification. I will always be grateful to that particular manager for realising employee training offers huge benefits because it certainly does. I was promoted, I took on more qualification course and even after leaving the sector to go freelance after starting a family, those benefits continued, as did my thirst for continued self-development.
Qualifications can have all kinds of meaning in the working world.
Employee Training Benefits: The Employer’s Opportunity
It is important that when considering an employee’s skill set that you look not just at what they can offer you but what you can offer them too. After all, the better trained the people on your payroll are, the better they’re going to be at working in your business. Here’s just a couple of the best qualifications an employer can offer as part of a benefits package; why not think about implementing them within your own company?
A Management Program
If you’ve got a junior staff position that’s constantly impressing you with what they do, it’s time to think about taking their qualifications to the next level. You should think about offering them some kind of management training, whether just as an in-house program or as a qualification that can be recognised on a national level.
After all, the more managers you have on site, the better your company is going to run (as long as the business isn’t too “top heavy”. You’re always going to have some kind of senior position available for work that day, even when one of your other managers pulls out, and it helps to share the responsibility of spearheading a small and privately owned business.
A Health and Safety Certification
Whether it’s a first aid course, or just a general health and safety conference or two that you’ve been asked to send your employees along to, knowing how to properly behave in the workplace is one of the best ways an employee will impress an employer. After all, a health and safety certification shows that this person is capable of taking initiative, and taking charge when the opportunity calls for it. It’s a skill in and of itself, and it’s one you should share and share alike.
Some of the top H&S qualifications out there can be found online. For example, you’ve got the website at https://www.questcover.com/health-and-safety/health-and-safety-training/, who base their entire company ethics around helping business owners to help their staff. So make sure you’re looking into offering this kind of training for anyone you take under your wing – it’ll be a great boost to their CV, and it’ll be a wonderful boon for how highly your company rates on the national standards scales.
What About You?
Do you train your staff? Do you give them the opportunity to make waves with their CV, and move up to bigger and better positions in your company? If you do the likelihood is that you will boost motivations, productivity, decrease staff turnover and altogether foster an innovative and progressive work atmosphere. During regular appraisals look at not just what “standard” qualifications you can offer an employee but what more holistic courses you can offer.
If like me you are self-employed, don’t use this as a reason to stop ongoing self-development. It could be that ongoing training will be the making of your freelance business.
