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!
It can be lonely at the top when you're running your own business. As the owner manager, the buck stops with you and that can result in all the pressures of financial management, people management, strategy and business performance ending on your shoulders. To ease this pressure, it's helpful to have a business coach. A coach can look at your business objectively as an outsider, will act as a professional shoulder to lean on, and can help you to focus on and enhance your business ideas, strategy and longer-term tactics as an owner.
Keeping on top of the financial management of your business can be hard work. It's possible to have a profitable business that is struggling to find the cash flow to pay expenses and fund growth. Likewise, you could have positive cash flow but are not turning a profit, particularly if you are scaling. Turning a profit is at the heart of running any successful company But without an even and predictable flow of cash into the company, you can't cover your overheads, you can't pay your employees and you can't run your day-to-day operations – let alone think about expanding and growing the business. In the end, you need both. But if you’re going to be in control of your financial destiny, it’s important to get your head around the important process of cash flow management.
A solopreneur running a complete and viable one-person business is no longer a pipedream. Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI, was recently quoted as saying that a one-person, billion-dollar business could be possible by 2026-2028, using tools like GPT-5 and the other generative AI tools that allow individuals to create and manage AI agents. The idea that one person, a solo CEO and entrepreneur, could generate that kind of capital on their own, would have seemed crazy less than a decade ago. But with the power of AI and the accessibility of flexible coding tools and AI agents, it’s actually a real possibility. Let’s look at how a one-person business could work, and how the basic business model differs from the traditional tech start-up model that we’ve known for so many decades.