TheMarketingblog

Keeping pace with staff training needs

Marketing is a fast-paced world. A strategy that worked last year can be ineffective this year.

As a result, anyone who works in the industry must be ready, and willing, to learn new skills, and do so quickly. For many marketing firms keeping pace with training is a challenge.

This is the case whether you have a handful of employees or hundreds. Identifying training needs, and getting the right people through the best courses is time consuming, and difficult to manage.

How HR software can help

Fortunately, this is something that business software developers like Cascade HR are aware of. They have responded to the challenge by developing human resources software that helps firms to manage their training programmes effectively. If you want to find out more about how the right HR package can help you to identify skill gaps, and use targeted training to fill them, all you need to do is to read on.

Identify skill gaps

Once a company has identified skill gaps, they have two choices. They can develop in-house training, or end their personnel on courses ran by outside providers.

Most firms opt for a combination of the two. For example, if you want to make sure members of your team know how to use the latest social media platform putting together a simple training video makes sense. Usually, it will only take an hour or two to make the video, and put together a test task to check that what you have just shown someone has been fully understood.

Whereas investing hundreds of hours in putting together a complex training programme to develop your supervisor’s management skills makes less sense. This is especially the case if you only need to put a handful of people through the training. In that situation, it makes sense to use an outside contractor to deliver the training on your behalf. It is just more economical to do so.

Regardless of what type of training you decide to provide, or in what format you want it delivered, it is very important to make sure that the right people go through the right courses. That is where a good HR package can help.

Provided you buy a high quality package, you can use it to set out a training schedule for your entire business. You can work out what skills are needed, and when training needs to be completed by.

For example, if you know that a key member of your team is to set to retire you can check your personnel database to see if the skills you will lose when they leave are already present in your existing workforce. If nobody has those skills yet, you can potentially choose to train up one of you existing employees to fulfil that role.

In addition, you can use HR software to keep track of any legally mandated training. For example, ensure that you have enough trained first aiders and fire marshals available.

You can learn more about identifying and addressing your firm’s training needs using this link.