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Skills training failing to meet employee needs

Without continued training and skills development many Americans believe their current workplace skills will be outdated within the next five years, according to a recent global workplace survey by Kelly Services.

The survey found that more than three-quarters of Americans surveyed predict that their job skills will be outdated within five years and believe the training currently provided by their employers will fail to meet their future career needs.

“Many organizations in an effort to cut expenses may eliminate or reduce training opportunities, but this will cause businesses to become less innovative and without the capacity to compete,” says Mike Webster, Kelly Services Executive Vice President and General Manager.

As revealed in the survey, people across all generations in the workforce depend on training and development to stay competitive in the changing labor market.

People’s views regarding their workplace skills varied in different regions of the U.S., according to the survey:

• Workers in the West are most concerned about their skill sets, with 82% worried that they are becoming outdated.
• People living in the Northeast are the most confident that their current skill levels are sustainable.
• Gen Y workers (18 to 29 years old) living in the West and Midwest are the most worried about their workplace skills.
• Gen X workers (30 to 47 years old) are more concerned about the adequacy of their skills than any other age group in the U.S.
• Workers in the South are the most satisfied with the quality of training provided by their employers.
• More than half of the Baby Boomer generation (aged 48 to 65) feel they have been let down by their employer’s human resources departments in managing their careers. Workers in the Northeast are the most critical in this area.

The majority of those surveyed (77%) believe that training should be a joint responsibility between employers and employees. The workers surveyed said they most prefer on-the-job training (42%), followed by professional development courses (26%), self-initiated learning (20%) and formal university or college courses (12%).

“The current economic environment has made people very aware of their skills and whether they will be sufficient to survive the recession and beyond, into a period of economic recovery,” Webster says.

Do you think our current economic situation has put an added significance on employee training and skills development? Are you concerned that your current workplace skills will become outdated in the coming years?

Leave a comment and let us know.

Domino’s employee video goes viral, is poor training to blame?

When you order a pizza you generally trust that none of the toppings have landed in someone’s nose before they made it on your pizza. Right?

Sadly, there’s a new viral video sweeping the Internet that has seriously damaged customers’ trust in one of the country’s most popular pizza chains and two employees are to blame.

A couple of Domino’s employees are now unemployed and facing felony charges after posting videos of themselves defacing food while preparing it for delivery. The videos show an employee breaking various health-code standards including sticking cheese up his nose, putting nasal mucus on sandwiches and passing gas on salami before it made it onto a sandwich.

“We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea,” said a Domino’s spokesman, Tim McIntyre, who added that the company was preparing a civil lawsuit. “Even people who’ve been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino’s, and that’s not fair.” (New York Times)

Company President Patrick Doyle has posted a YouTube video of his own apologizing for the unacceptable behavior of these two infamous employees and asks that customers continue their support, despite the embarrassment it has brought to the company.

"You can be the safest driver, you know," McIntyre said. "But there's going to be that Friday night someone's drunk and comes from out of nowhere. You can do the best you can, but there's going to be the equivalent of that drunk driver that hits the innocent victim." (Advertising Age)

You hope that most employees would have enough common sense to refrain from illegal activity at work, let alone film it and post it on YouTube, but some may need a reminder from time to time.

A great way to remind employees how to act online when representing the company is through regular training. After you’ve developed a sound social media policy (read our guidelines for social media use), it’s time to explain the policy and consequences for not following that policy to employees.

How formal or informal your employee social media use training will vary depending on the nature of your business, but should give employees a clear understanding of what is considered acceptable online behavior when representing the company.

There’s no doubt that your policies and social media guidelines will change as new technologies and social networking tools emerge, so it’s best to provide training on an on-going basis.

The best way to defend your company against an unfortunate situation like what Domino’s is going through right now is through preparation. It’s impossible to control what employees will say about you online, but with clear policies, employee training and the proper planning, you’ll be in a much better place to handle any issue.

Do you think poor training could have played a role in Domino’s current dilemma? Does your organization train employees on how to represent the company online?

Employee training in the news: The good, the bad and the ugly

There have been some interesting stories in the news covering employee training issues in the past weeks. Some are good, some are bad, while others are downright ugly. Here’s a rundown of a few of the top stories:

The good

Just to be nice, we’ll give you the good news first, in the form of some good advice from Keith McFarland at BusinessWeek. In his opinion, too many companies are complaining that their teams don’t have the skills to deal with the problems created by the economic downturn. “But instead of complaining, what management really needs to do right now is put less emphasis on getting the “right people” and more on getting the “people right,”” he says.

Getting the “people right” involves having managers sit down with their employees to talk about what the company could do to help each person develop their skills. Managers should put together a development plan for each employee including training and measurable objectives for each employee to achieve.


The bad

In this case, we’re talking about “bad” employee training as in the cool kind of bad. Like how Assurant Employee Benefits, a Kansas City-based benefits carrier, has improved training engagement by using a series of training video games.

Marcelo Vegara, Assurant’s video training game developer, says the games deliver information “in a way that's going to stick with people. It's active learning, not a sit-back-and-snooze kind of environment."

Since adding the games into their training mix, Assurant has found increased employee engagement, outstanding participation results and improved training retention. That goes down as some “bad” training in our books.


The ugly

Let's make that really ugly. A man in the Chicago area recently answered a newspaper ad for a job in the auto industry that claimed to pay a “generous salary” during training, as reported by the Chicago Tribune. After being hired on the spot, the man was told he had to pay $629 for training materials, a fee he would get back after a 90-day probationary period.

The man was fired after two weeks, received a meager compensation for his work, and wanted his training money back. The problem is that the money he spent on training supplies went to an outside training industry that refused to refund his money, but would provide him with “lifetime placement assistance” for another auto job if he wanted. He doesn’t want their help and is still fighting for that refund.


There they are, the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of employee training. Let’s hope this week holds a lot more good and the good kind of “bad” employee training that we love to see going on.