Understanding training needs

Phrases like “people are at the heart of the business” and “our business depends on people” form part of the standard expressions of many bosses who want to stress how important their employees are to their business.

Making these phrases mean something is not straightforward of course; it is especially difficult for small business where concentrating on day-to-day priorities is an essential part of staying in business. These everyday challenges often mean that the needs of employees are overlooked until it is too late.

Business Development Agencies have several key tasks and one of them is to help small businesses build the skills and competences they need by offering training activities tailored to suit their needs.

Once the needs have been identified then training interventions can be planned. Of course, training events need not be conventional courses but could be coaching in the workplace, online training, using consultants to pass on expertise in a specific area, some form of on-thejob experience, or even an attachment to another organisation. Training services can be an important source of revenue for any BDA, especially if the needs have been clearly understood and the proposed training interventions lead to performance improvement in the business.

The challenge for the BDA then is to understand the needs of small businesses, identify and plan effective training interventions and monitor effectively what has been done and the results achieved. Monitoring training activities and obtaining feedback from delegates should be a priority.

Feedback is vital for the following reasons:

• systematic collection of feedback helps the BDA to plan training activities more effectively;
• feedback obtained over a period is useful in identifying good quality training products and trainers;
• positive feedback can help BDAs to “sell” training to other companies.

Training courses can cover a wide range of topics from hard skills like market research techniques, business planning, or quality management to soft skills such as customer service, communication skills, negotiation skills or interviewing and assessment.

CNCP is ready to help BDAs with their training activities provided they can be shown to improve the performance of small business, thereby facilitating the creation of more jobs.

Chris Bailey,
CNCP Expert