Training and Development: A Must-Have Line Item in Your Budget

If you’re anything like most of us, training and development is more towards the bottom of the list after paid leaves, health insurance, retirement plans, etc. While all of these are important, having monetary resources to grow and develop your team is critical.

What are ways to provide training and development for employees?

There’s the obvious -- virtual or in-person training, which could be done internally or externally and could likely be something you’ve started without even realizing.  

Internal training might look like someone inside the company hosting a training over video, in a conference room, at a lunch & learn, or maybe on a smaller scale through a mentor/mentee relationship. External training might look like directing employees to an external online training and development platform. They may travel to a new city to learn a new skill or contract with an executive coach. Another option to provide training and development to employees would be to implement training specifically for managers. Focusing on managers, the people who have the most interaction with their employees, can create a ripple effect for training and growth for the rest of the organization.

How do you know you’ve put together a successful training and development program?

Employees like it - Is the platform user-friendly? Is the in-person training engaging? Do employees like it? If your answer to these is no, it will be hard to get buy-in from the most important people -- the employees using the information.

Employees find it helpful - Make sure your training and development program helps employees learn new and useful information. If employees feel the training is a waste of time, what’s the point?

Employees remember what they learned - Keep training short and not overly complicated to help employees retain what they learned. If you decide to capitalize on Manager Training mentioned above, encourage managers to discuss the training topics with their employees. If not, what are other ways you could facilitate concept reinforcement? Post-training quiz? Employee games? Happy hour with prompts to get discussion focused on training?

Regardless of what type of training you decide to use and how you accomplish it, two things remain the same -- do it now and don’t stop until it’s successful.

Revised 9/12/23