When businesses think about corporate training courses, it can be tempting to begin with a course that everyone is doing and that looks good on paper. But there is a more useful question to ask first: What are you trying to achieve? Think big picture.
According to Time Education & Training Client Relationship Manager Jenny Baber, most workplace training needs tend to fall into four distinct areas.
Organisations are trying to create, develop, prevent or address something.
Looking at upskilling through this lens can help businesses move beyond training for training’s sake and instead connect workforce development with genuine organisational outcomes.
1. Create
Sometimes an organisation is building something new. That might mean creating a new workforce, establishing capability in a new area, preparing employees for organisational growth or developing an internal training function.
Corporate training courses can support that process by helping businesses identify the skills their people will need and build those capabilities deliberately. This is particularly important when an organisation is growing, changing direction or responding to workforce shortages.
Rather than waiting for a skills gap to become a problem, organisations can use training as part of the strategy for building the workforce they will need next.
2. Develop
The people an organisation needs may already be inside the business.
In this situation, training becomes a way to develop existing employees and prepare them for new responsibilities rather than having to incur the expense and resources to externally hire.
One common example is leadership.
A high-performing employee may be promoted into a supervisory or team leader position because they are excellent at their job. But leading former colleagues requires an adjustment in capabilities.
‘Transitioning from a colleague to a leader is a different skill set,’ Jenny explains.
Some people make that transition naturally whilst others benefit from structured support to build communication, leadership and management capability.
This is where corporate training courses, such as the leadership development program, can sit alongside an organisation’s wider workforce and succession planning. Development can also help businesses retain knowledge, broaden skills and create stronger internal career pathways.
3. Prevent
Not all training is designed to create something new. Sometimes its value lies in preventing something from happening, such as work-related injury, incidents, unnecessary waste or other problems that affect employees and the organisation.
Manual handling training is a clear example of this. The purpose isn’t simply for employees to complete a refresher program. The intended outcome is safer work practices and ultimately a reduced risk of injury.
Jenny encourages organisations to look beyond attendance figures and consider the actual effect of training. Have incident rates changed? Has workplace injury reduced? Are employees applying what they have learned? This is all great data for your workplace to keep track of.
Those questions help organisations evaluate training based on its impact rather than simply whether it occurred.
4. Address
The fourth area is perhaps the most obvious: solving a problem that already exists.
An organisation might have identified inconsistent processes, leadership challenges, a skills shortage or an operational issue that needs attention.
Training can then be designed around that problem. For example, Time Education & Training’s root cause analysis training can be contextualised using real workplace scenarios. Rather than discussing an abstract case study, participants may be able to examine an issue relevant to their own organisation and apply the learning as they go so it’s much more than a theoretical exercise.
Start with the outcome
The important point is that corporate training shouldn’t exist separately from the rest of the business. Organisations already have strategies around recruitment, retention, workforce development, safety, growth and operations. Training can easily sit alongside all of them.
‘Training is there in order to get an outcome,’ Jenny says. ‘That is also why the most useful training solution isn’t necessarily the biggest one.’
Sometimes an organisation may ask for a particular corporate training course and discover, after discussing the underlying need, that another approach would deliver a better result.
The aim isn’t to provide more training but the right training that solves the problem.
Consider these four questions:
- What are we trying to create?
- What do we need to develop?
- What are we trying to prevent?
- And what problem do we need to address?
The answers provide a much stronger starting point for building a workforce training strategy.
