Both hiring high-end professionals every month and paying for professional training is expensive. Yet, losing ground in business due to failure to keep up with the latest trends is equally undesirable. Here are a few tips about how to advance your employees’ expertise without spending any money.
1. Benefit from Partnerships
Today, multiple companies hold paid conferences offering free access to partners’ representatives. Thus, for instance, we cooperate with the Garant system and our colleagues attend professional workshops dedicated to new standards, legislative changes, innovative tools, etc. on a regular basis.
Major companies open their doors to colleagues. You can learn about the market leaders’ practices, learn about their solutions, and adopt the top specialist’s experience. Employees at junior positions may be sent to such events to get them inspired by the other companies’ work.
Potentially, your customers may organise private club meetings that you can access. This kind of events have a much higher status than open conferences. This is a venue where you can learn about real-life cases instead of the stories adapted for the general public, get acquainted with new people, and even find new customers.
2. Ensure Knowledge Transfer between Employees
This point concerns both training and business continuity. A situation when your company has an employee with a special know-how that he/she is unwilling to share with anyone else exposes your company to risks. Imagine that this employee falls sick, retires, takes a vacation. What will happen to his/her area of responsibility? Do you expect your employee to work for life?
Oftentimes, such employees become star-ridden and twist the employer’s arms by demanding flexible hours, top-manager salary, a variety of benefits, etc.
Considering this, think about making the unique expertise available to the other employees. Invite the specialist to deliver master classes to colleagues, find an assistant for him/her to fill in during absence. In addition, the specialist could make a regular digest for the other employees.
It has been quite common in our company when an employee attends an event and tells the colleagues about the most interesting cases applicable to our company. Have you completed an interesting course? Share your new knowledge with colleagues.
3. Administer You Own Training Sessions
I will start by giving an example. We cannot afford sending sales managers to regular advanced training courses. Nevertheless, we solved this problem: every month, we pick up a book about sales that someone recommended to us or when it has a lot of positive reviews, and assign it for the entire department to read. After the colleagues read the book, they get together to discuss the ideas they have learnt and share their impressions.
The key is that instead of just discussing the ideas from the book, we think about the ideas we could use and the ways to use them in our company. It is an exciting way to learn about the innovative sales practices and test them at the department meeting straight away.
This sort of clubs address multiple problems at once: acquisition of new expertise and communication gaps, as employees have very limited time to communicate.
4. Use Friendly Ties
The marketing department invited the employees willing to establish themselves in the trade to the personal branding courses. One of the sessions was intended to demonstrate the functioning of mass and social media. It would have been extravagant for the company to involve outside journalists and bloggers with a multi-million audience. Instead, the marketing department employees invited the friendly representatives of the sector who are just as competent in the tools mentioned above. As a result, the company acquired new information and saved its budget.
The same applies to the other sectors. It may be that some of your customers or partners would be willing to deliver training to the sales or market trends employees, presentations, or any practical sessions. Experience shows that employees are more enthusiastic about acquiring information from outside speakers than from their colleagues. Our colleagues looked forward to meeting with the experts. In addition, this served as an excellent opportunity to establish friendly relations with the customer’s representatives and/or partners.
5. Do Not Disregard Free Events
Many have a prejudice against free events thinking that they can never offer anything useful. I find this fundamentally wrong. Free events may prove more efficient than expensive conferences featuring a foreign speaker. As a rule, the latter are serve as a tool to make money for the organisers rather than a source of knowledge and ideas for participants.
I know a lot of professional coaches giving free training sessions. It is a great piece of luck to get to such sessions. First, you get access to the information that is normally restricted. And second, you can get acquainted with the other professionals in the sector, learn about what the other companies are doing, etc.
Source: www.e-xecutive.ru
Deputy Head of HR Services Department, BDO Unicon Outsourcing
