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The European Commission has officially launched skills development programmes for Europeans, which will see more than 540 million professionals receive additional training by 2025 to develop the skills needed to compete equitably in the current labour market.
Also, according to a PwC survey, 93% of CEOs noticed an increase in labour productivity after their employees received such training. In this regard, in her article for the popular U.K. edition of Entrepreneur, Mila Semeshkina, founder and CEO of the Lectera platform, explained what opportunities a culture of upskilling opens up for companies and how to effectively assess the profitability of such development.
In Mila Semeshkina's opinion, the crucial element is to consider investing in employee training not as a waste of budgetary funds, but as a tool for increasing profits. Of course, a company cannot invest in all programmes across the board - it must be based on the skills that an employee lacks in order to achieve a specific business result. At the end of the programme, one should assess the following:
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Quality of knowledge acquired. Did the employee acquire the skills for which you sent them to be trained? Did the employee become more efficient in performing their primary job tasks? Did the programme have a positive effect on one of the business areas?
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Sales and performance improvement. The easiest way to measure the impact of a training programme is to monitor the key KPIs of your business and changes in them. Training should definitely cause them to increase. However, the same training can raise different KPIs for each employee!
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Employee retention rate. When employees see that a company is interested in their development and is willing to invest in it, they stay with the company for years to come. Simply put, having professional development programmes in place, according to some reports, reduces employee turnover by 58% and increases employee engagement with the business.
As Mila Semeshkina points out, it is very important to analyse these three factors together. If a certain employee demonstrates particularly high performance after their training, they can be asked to motivate the rest of the team to learn, or appointed as a mentor or even a teacher. A culture of upskilling can become an indispensable part of the overall corporate culture and make your company a niche leader.
Read more about how to track training profitability metrics and what else it can do for a business in the full article by Mila Semeshkina on the official Entrepreneur UK website!
