Linking Training Programs With Organizational Goals

It is the practice in many organizations to conduct training programs periodically for their employees. Often, these training programs are conducted to enhance on the job skills and to enable the employees to pick up valuable soft skills. Further, the training programs can be technical, job oriented or human resource management skills oriented. For instance, it is common in technology companies and especially the big companies to provide a mandatory portion of training measured in hours per quarter for each employee. However, an aspect that is often sidelined is the effectiveness of the training programs and their linkage to organizational goals. This aspect makes the training programs lose their purpose and drains precious resources as well as waste of employee time that could have been used productively. To surmount this, organizations need to link training programs to Specific, Measurable, and Achievable, Realistic and Time Bound goals that is a proven method for ensuring that organizational goals are met. To explain, hr training programs have to be aimed at specific goals like training on a particular skill.

The outputs from the training programs have to be measurable meaning that an exit test must be held at the end of the training program to assess the impact of the training program on employees. Further, the training programs have to have realistic goals and not aim for drastic improvements to the skill levels of the employee. The point here is that this focused approach to training pays off better than conducting trainings where the employees think more about what to do when they head back to their desks or are distracted by too many concepts being thrown at them. Finally, training programs are time bound as mentioned earlier. This means that employees have to be trained periodically so that they retain their competitiveness and their edge and not become obtuse or blunted in their job. In some companies, it is common for employees to be trained offsite on experiential and exercise based training which involves physical activity. 
 

Organizational Goals And Strategic Business Objectives

• Increasing Financial Gains: Increasing annual revenue or profit is the most common type of business objective. But in order to increase financial gains, the business needs to reduce costs, while making more sales. And to do this, they require a strong, competent and motivated workforce who understands their respective roles in achieving the business’ strategy. 

• Building a Brand Reputation: The better the business reputation, the longer the list of loyal customers it tends to boast. This means knowledgeable sales consultants, helpful support staff, high-quality products and services, and skilled user-experience experts.

• Improving Speed of Production: Producing products and services faster enables businesses to reach more customers in the same amount of time. This means lower costs, and increased sales. But more efficient production requires employees who are skilled in their roles, and who can work quickly without risking quality. Top Recruitment Agencies come into the picture and can help the HR Manager to recruit candidate as per the organization’s requirement.

• Maintaining a Competitive Advantage: In today’s global economy, it’s not enough to be the fastest. Businesses need to continuously learn, to innovate, and to customize their offerings. This allows the business to compete proactively, rather than react passively to change. But embracing new technologies and practices, and evolving with changing market demands, requires a resilient and learning-focused workforce.  
 

Why You Should Align Your Training Programs

The achievement of business objectives is quite clearly related to the people who work in the business. Their knowledge, skills, and motivation to learn are key to increased sales, improved brand reputation, efficient production, and competitive advantage. This is why training, and its alignment to strategic business objectives, becomes so important. By cascading the strategic vision and mission down to training and development goals, employees are able to see them operationalized. Because when hr certification training programs are designed and developed toward business strategy, employees are able to better understand how they personally contribute to the achievement of business objectives. This is why every training program should be practical and relevant to the roles and responsibilities of employees, and directly assist them in achieving their performance goals. 
 

Steps for Aligning Training With Business Strategy

Aligning training with business strategy requires little more than simple steps, followed in a logical order.

• Identify your strategic business objectives: Start by understanding the strategic business objectives that you’re working toward achieving. These might be related to hard goals, like increased revenue, profit, or productivity, or softer goals like brand reputation, customer experience, or organizational culture. 

• Define the performance results necessary for achieving them: Now, in order to achieve the strategic objectives that you’ve identified, you’ll need to define the performance results that will reflect their success. For example, increased revenue might rely on higher sales, and a reduced number of customer complaints might indicate that customer experience is improving.

• Identify the roles, tasks and competency areas where this performance will be measured: Because you’ve defined the performance results that will lead to your strategic business objectives, you can start to identify the specific roles, tasks, knowledge, and skills that will help the business to perform in the right ways. Like how Sales Consultants might help to achieve increased sales through their first contact calls, and how Support Teams could use their knowledge of the online platform to better assist customers who have queries.         

• Evaluate the gaps and set related learning goals: Once you know which roles, tasks, and competencies can help you achieve your performance results, it’s time to evaluate where the skills gaps lie. So, within each role, assess the level of knowledge, skills, and abilities. And where there are gaps, set the learning objectives that will close them. 

• Communicate these goals to employees: As much as you understand the importance of these learning objectives to the broader business strategy, don’t assume that employees share the same understanding. So, clearly communicate the importance of achieving these learning objectives, and how their achievement will enable employees to make a meaningful contribution to business strategy. 

• Design and develop training for achieving learning objectives: With your direction clearly defined, you can now design and develop training that is clearly aligned with broader strategic business objectives. By designing your training specifically to close the competency gaps identified before, your employees will be working toward their learning objectives. By achieving the learning objectives, they’ll be equipped to perform better in their roles. And that performance will directly contribute to the achievement of business strategy. You can also enroll for training courses, you can take help of indian college admission consultant who guides you in your career. 
 

Training that are done without purpose or focus end up wasting the employees time as well as drain of organizational resources. Hence, the aim that the HR management courses must strive for is to maximize the effectiveness of the training programs and increase the gains from such training. By incorporating business strategic objectives into performance metrics, one will be designing and developing training with real business impact.