Ensure that the training budgets spend for this financial year has a positive impact

Education and further training is an extremely important part of employees development, especially if there is a particular skill gap that individuals within an organisation could undertake training on. If you have a certain time of the year where you schedule in training, you may be looking at what sorts of training would be most beneficial.

Identify the skills:

Now is the perfect time to sit down and really think about the skills your employees need to have. This may be very different for each member of your team, depending on what their job role entails. People who work behind the scenes will certainly have a different skills-set requirement to those who are customer facing. It is very important to consider individuals specific needs, based on their role within the organisation.

Make sure that you draw up a skills list that you expect individuals to have. You may want to sit down with their direct line manager to make sure that you are gathering an accurate representation of the type of training they may need.

Taking time to write out what you want from employees, will make it easy to see if your employees are living up to your expectations, or whether there is a gap that requires addressing. Gaps in knowledge could be because legislation has changed or there is a change in an internal policy within your organisation.

Ask around:

One way to see if your employees are performing is to gather feedback from internal and external stakeholders that they interact with on a daily basis. This can be a wealth of knowledge in relation to obtaining clarity on any knowledge gaps.

If your employees are in a customer facing role, it is imperative to offer your customers the ability to provide feedback on the service they receive. This will mean you can identify what your employees are doing well, and gaps that require addressing. This form of feedback is sometimes difficult to obtain, as there is no way of making a customer provide feedback, so you may not gather enough data to make an informed decision.

Another way to obtain feedback is by directly asking employees. Many organisations get employees to fill out an anonymous 360-degree feedback form.

A 360-degree feedback is a method and a tool that provides each employee the opportunity to receive

“If you want to see how your employees are doing with things like interacting with customers, and dealing with customer enquiries over the phone, role plays may be the best way to get a general idea.”

performance feedback from their managers, peers and reporting employees and also external customers. It also provides an opportunity for managers and individuals to understand how their effectiveness as an employee is viewed by others.

This form is designed to evaluate an employee’s performance from all sides. In order to get a clear picture of how your employees are getting on in the workplace you could ask them to fill out one themselves, as well as asking their manager, or anyone who is managed by that employee, and people who work directly with the employee. This will enable you to see how they work in all different aspects of their role, as they could be excellent at managing their own employees, however, perhaps not as good at working with people outside their immediate team.

Create questions in the questionnaire which apply to the sorts of skills you expect your employees to have, and then you can see which areas they are falling short on. Questions are typically answered in the form of a numbered scale, so you can easily compare the answers from many different sources, and see which areas they may need work in.

Finally, ask the employees directly! Some people may be very aware that there is a gap in their knowledge that is affecting their work life and are very keen to obtain further training to address the issue. If many of your employees has similar answers, you can be sure that booking a training course around that gap would be a very wise decision.

This may not work for all skills required in your workplace, however, if you have a particular skill that you can easily test, it may be the best way to see how your employees are performing. There are several ways in which to do this.

Observation:

If you want to see how your employees are doing with things like interacting with customers, and dealing with customer enquiries over the phone, role plays may be the best way to get a general idea. While your employees may be on their best behaviour if they know they are being assessed, it will still provide you with a good indication if they are asking all the right questions, or if they know how to deal with certain problems in the correct way.

Practical:

This is similar to role play and a great way to see if employees can carry out the tasks you expect them to be able to do in the workplace. Whether it is filling in a document a certain way or the stages of identifying a customer problem with a payment issue, it is important that your employees know how you expect them to do their job, and a practical test enables you to see where they require additional training.

Questioning:

This is a good way to test your employees on their knowledge of your company’s procedures, on how to undertake tasks. This will allow you to quickly and clearly identify where gaps in their knowledge are evident. It could be a question on how they would deal with a new customer, or how they deal with a customer complaint, so you can identify if there are any pieces of the company procedures that they feel are unclear, or they do not understand.

Now you should have a better idea of where the knowledge gaps lie within your employees, which means you can go ahead and start booking the relevant training to get everyone on the same page, so to speak.

Taking the time to recognise skill gaps is an excellent exercise, as it means you are providing relevant training for your employees, and not just what you assume they need as sometimes personalities can cloud judgement.

This should also help your employees recognise that they are valued and that you are keen to train them on the things that will make their lives easier, and improve their workday, and that you are not just providing training for the sake of it. For the best results, make sure your repeat this type of exercise regularly, so if you do identify any skill gaps, you can address them before they become a critical issue.

What it means for you?

It is important to start thinking about what skills will be required in the future within your role and within the credit industry. As part of the research process it is worth collecting as much information on current and emerging roles via industry and government reports, social media platforms such as LinkedIn, thought leader periodicals, job search sites such as Seek or via education and professional associations such as AICM to gain an understanding of what your future and future training requirements may look like.