How staff training expands the skill-set of your business

Anna Stubbs • April 3, 2023

Spending time and money on staff training is a must. When your employees can see that you're invested in their future, they feel valued, empowered and engaged with your company vision. That's excellent news for your employee satisfaction scores and your team spirit – not to mention the overall productivity of the workforce.

Investing in the future of your team

If you want great things from your people, you’ve got to give them the very best support. A job is not a static thing. It’s a role that will evolve and change over time, with new skills, new job descriptions and new responsibilities along the way.

 

To offer your team the best opportunities, make staff training and development a key area on your business leader’s to-do list.

 

As a starting point:

 

  • Find out what training and education your people want – there’s no point second-guessing what your team wants to learn. Talk to each team member and ask them where they feel they need extra skills, or where there’s room for progression in their training. This can be an enlightening process and helps you get an angle on where these new skills could be used within the business.
  • Help them find the relevant courses or in-house training – you may be able to offer some key training in-house, as long as you have people available to do this, who have the skills. There are also plenty of professional bodies, industry institutes or colleges that will offer courses in the right areas. Some may qualify for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points, a system that helps your employees rack up development points and move towards a professional qualification.
  • Set clear targets for their education in the business – once you’ve identified the learning and development that’s needed, make sure this is added to the employee’s development plan for the year. Your employee’s goals could be to complete an online training module, go on a residential course, or take part in mentoring sessions with a senior colleague. The important thing is to agree on the goals, set the right timelines and track each person’s progress against their plan.
  • Set a career path and give employees increased responsibility – a key goal for most employees will be to aim for a promotion. With their learning and development goals set, you could also think about giving your employee new responsibilities, testing out their managerial skills or giving them specific projects to manage and curate. By taking on these challenges, and testing their new skills out in the real world, you’ll help them build confidence and gain valuable hands-on experience.
  • Check in with your staff regularly to see how they're doing – hopefully, you’ll have a quarterly or yearly review process already set up for your staff. But don’t leave discussions about development purely for these review conversations. Check in with your people throughout the working week and use these informal, relaxed chats to see how each person (and each team) is doing.


Setting up a staff training programme

 

An investment in employee development is an investment in the future of your business. It’s a sign that you want to support the careers and progression of your people!

By Anna Stubbs June 3, 2025
No one can deny that to grow your business, you must attract new potential customers (or leads). It’s how you generate these leads that’s important though. STEP is a lead generation acronym to help you generate quality leads without pointlessly blowing your marketing budget: S = Strategy T = Target E = Efficiency P = Process
By Anna Stubbs June 3, 2025
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential to measure the performance of your business in order to grow your numbers. Of course, the measures themselves are pointless unless there’s reflection and discussion to ensure they’re met. Here’s a simple and effective way to link KPIs to a reporting and accountability framework. Firstly, make sure there is ONE leader for each of the departments in your business: Director, Leadership, Product / Service Development, Operations, Marketing, Sales, Finance, HR, and Admin / IT. One person can lead more than one department, but two people can’t lead one department. You can also contract out departments to avoid needing a large head count of team memebrs (finance, marketing and IT can be outsourced relatively easily). Be clear on who reports to who . One person can only manage 5 or so people effectively. Consider establishing teams with team leaders to enable you to achieve a ratio under 6 to 1. Set up regular department meetings . This may be the CEO with each of the other department heads, the Operations Leader with the Operations team (if less than 5 in the Operations team) or with the Operations Team Leaders (if more than 5 in the Operations team).
By Anna Stubbs June 3, 2025
One of the simplest ways to grow your bottom line is to tighten your belt and spend less.