Teach employees to fish... for training

You know how it goes, “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.”

Well, the same holds true when it comes to employee training. When you teach employees how to fish, or find training on their own, they’ll continue on the same path for a lifetime, or at least for the time they spend at your company.

Teaching employees to fish for training begins with a course in company culture. Only by fostering a culture that promotes education and skills training will employees feel that learning is not only encouraged, but a necessary part of their career.

Getting started doesn’t have to use up a ton of resources either. Encourage employees to fish, for training, that is, by implementing a few of these ideas:

• Improve education from the inside out. Instead of having employees look outside to seminars and courses, give them opportunities to learn within the walls of your workplace. Something as simple as an in-house learning library can give employees the tools they need to make a difference.


• Create your own trainers. Some of the best training resources are right there under your nose – you hired them. Create a peer-to-peer training program where employees share their expertise with others. Without ever stepping foot outside, you’ll be fostering teamwork, improving engagement and encouraging employees to seek out training on their own.


• Embrace technology. These days, finding new learning outlets can be as simple as turning on your computer. From Twitter to online learning courses, technology has made learning more accessible, and affordable, than ever before.


• Try something new. Start a new in-house learning program, like “lunch-and-learn” training sessions. Typically more relaxed and less structured than traditional training courses, lunch-and-learns are a great way to fit training into everyone’s busy day.

Sign up an employee for a training course, he’ll have training for today. Encourage an employee to seek out training on their own, and he’ll have training for a lifetime.

Any more ideas on encouraging employees to discover training on their own? Please leave a comment and let us know.

Free e-book: E-Learning Survival Guide

Whether you’re currently enrolled in an online course, or have employees signed up for e-learning opportunities, there’s a new free guide available online to check out.

Susan Smith Nash (aka. the E-Learning Queen) is offering a free pdf download of her E-Learner Survival Guide, “everything you need to know to succeed in the wild and wooly world of mobile learning, elearning, and hybrid college, K-12, and career courses.” (Thanks to those at Workplace Learning Today for sharing the good news.)

The book contains hundreds of essays on a broad list of topics from student engagement and institutional leadership, to mobile learning and corporate training.

Nash writes that the book is especially focused on creating successful outcomes for students and educational programs. Her essays also explain how to handle “often-overlooked” niches of learners, including generational differences and training.

Take a quick trip over to the E-Learning Queen to download your free copy of the E-Learner Survival Guide.

Negative feedback can be a gift

At least that’s how Sam Chapman, CEO and author of The No Gossip Zone, chooses to look at it. In Chapman’s opinion, positive and negative feedback both play important roles in our careers. Instead of looking at negative feedback and constructive criticism as an insult, we should be thinking of it as a gift.

“Without negative feedback, we would never improve ourselves and our lives,” said Sam Chapman. “And after enough practice at accepting negative feedback, you might even find yourself letting out an involuntary “hmm” noise as you realize the truth in a bit of negative feedback.”

Here are four of Chapman’s steps to dealing with negative feedback in a positive way (via Talent Management):

• Don’t blame the messenger. By accepting that everyone has something valuable they can teach us about who we are, we open up to a realm of creativity, growth and success that we never thought possible.
• Curb your defenses. Take a step back, a deep breath and remove yourself from the situation for a moment.
• Feel the emotions, but don’t get stuck. Be careful not to get so caught up in being angry that you don’t have the energy to realize what you need to do to improve.
• Turn your feedback into a request. Make sure your feedback isn’t in the form of a complaint. The gift of feedback is much easier to receive when it’s in the form of a request rather than a complaint.

And here’s some more great advice on how to handle negative feedback from Alissa Livingston, a merchandise planner for men's clothing and furnishings at Polo Ralph Lauren, from All Business:

Companies restructure faster by firing and hiring, not retraining

As many of the country’s largest employers eliminate thousands of jobs, they’re simultaneously hiring workers for new positions to adapt to the market’s changing needs, according to a Wall Street Journal article published yesterday.

U.S. employers eliminated 539,000 jobs in April alone, said the Labor Department on Friday. However, the government also estimates that employers hired roughly 4.4 million workers in February, the most recent numbers available.

"It's not just routine turnover," says Lori Kletzer, an economics professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Quite often the people being laid off don't have the requisite set of skills or experience to move into the growth areas."

Some experts say the churn also shows changes in workplace policies. In past decades, many employers retrained and relocated underused workers, says Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. “Now they've discovered that you can restructure even faster by laying off and hiring.” (WSJ)

Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, Yahoo and Time Warner are among the companies laying off thousands, while hiring new workers to fill positions in different business units, other places or to fill a need for new skills.

These latest employment numbers support a belief that many Americans currently share -- without continued training and skills development, their current workplace skills will be outdated within the next few years.

Workers across all generations depend on training and development to stay competitive in the changing labor market, but more than three-quarters of Americans believe the training provided by their employers will fail to meet their future career needs.

Has your company decided to fire and hire, instead of training existing employees for new positions? Is it the employer’s responsibility to develop workers’ skills for their future career needs?

Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

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.

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.

Training as punishment, or opportunity?

When you sign up employees for a training course or seminar, you do it because you want them to learn and develop skills that will enhance their careers and improve the organization. Right?

Unfortunately, employees don’t always look at training in the same light. Sometimes they feel that they’ve been enrolled in training as a form of punishment, or because they’re deficient in some way.

A headline-making example of training seen as punishment came about last year with US Airways. As a result of high fuel prices, the airlines forced their pilots to take fuel-management courses if they ordered extra fuel for their flights.

US Airways wanted to educate pilots on how wasting fuel negatively impacts the company, while pilots felt cutting back on fuel was dangerous and the mandatory training was an insult to their expertise.

Rebecca Morgan at Grow Your Key Talent summarized the issue in a recent post, saying:

Then US Airways pilots took out an ad that said the airline “embarked on a program of jailintimidation to pressure your captain to reduce fuel loads.” Senior pilots — those who are well aware of the vagaries of flights — were targeted for (gasp!) fuel conservation training.

Their punishment was training!

Part of this is the humiliation they felt at being senior pilots and being relegated to re-training as if they were rookies or didn’t know what they were doing.

One pilot said he felt the airline was “selecting a few and hoping to intimidate the remainder of our pilot group to not add fuel when they feel they might need a little fuel. So hoping if they punish a few, the rest of the pilot group will get in line.”

It’s quite obvious that the pilots were offended by US Airways’ decision, but what should they have done differently?

What could US Airways have done to make pilots see that this training was meant to better their careers and the improve the company, instead of making the training seem like a punishment?

Communication.

If you clearly communicate the reasons why you want employees to go through training and then listen to what they have to say about it, you will have a much better outcome that what we saw in the US Airways example.

A similar story is replayed everyday in the corporate world. If a manager suddenly signs up an employee for a training course on time management, without talking to them about it first, the employee may start thinking that you believe they’re an inefficient worker or it’s punishment for being late on that last report.

Each time you enroll employees in a training course, communicate your reason for the training and how it will help employees reach their personal career goals, as well as help the company improve overall performance. By discussing your motives for training, employees will start looking at it as less of a punishment and more like an opportunity.

What advice do you have for companies that are having trouble positioning training in a positive light? How do you show employees that training is not a punishment?

Should employees choose their own training?

Yesterday, Jim Giuliano at HR Morning shared one of his best HR management ideas: let employees find and choose their own training.

The idea became a winning solution to one company’s struggle to find new employee training ideas with limited resources, a common challenge many small companies face.

You can read the longer version at HR Morning, but here’s the basic story:

• During the recruiting process, people are told that the company is dedicated to continual learning and development, using training to reach career goals.
• Supervisors and HR don’t have enough time to come up with new training ideas relevant to the goals of the employee and company.
• The company can’t afford to hire a professional training coordinator.

Solution: Turn employees into their own training coordinators.

Employees find and choose their own training, under two conditions:

1. They must prove that the training correlates with their jobs and careers.
2. The cost of the training program must be justified (increased cost, increased benefit).

The company tried out the program for one year on an experimental basis with only a few employees.

Results were mixed: “Not all employees embraced the idea - some still wanted the supervisor to pick the training. But we found that the ones who did take control of their training often also happened to be our most motivated, top performers.”

Why it’s a great idea:

• It improves employee engagement by giving them the freedom to choose which areas they would like to improve on.
• It saves supervisors and HR time by having employees take over the task of researching new training ideas.

But what do you think?

Are you struggling with finding new ideas for employee training and think a program like this could work at your company? Should employees choose their own training? Could it cause any problems?

New program pays for job training in Michigan

In December, Michigan legislators passed a bill that will allow community colleges to create training programs for companies adding new jobs or for new businesses coming to the state.

Cost to businesses = $0

Cost to community colleges = $0

So how does it work?

Under the New Jobs Training Program, community colleges sell bonds to develop training programs for new companies moving to Michigan or existing companies creating new positions.

Employers can approach a community college with a number of jobs they need training for. The employer then signs a written contract with the community college to provide training at no cost to the trainees. The tuition for the training is primarily paid back through state income tax revenues created by the new jobs.

From the Lansing State Journal:

"This is not a hit to the state, because these are new jobs," said Michael Hansen, president of the Michigan Community College Association. "The state was never going to realize that income tax anyway. The jobs wouldn't exist except for this program."

Modeled on a successful program in Iowa, the initiative "is a win for the community college, because they develop training capacity," he said, adding that several of the state's community colleges, Lansing Community College among them, have already expressed interest.

"It's a win for the company, because they get their workers trained for free," he said.

The only catch is that the jobs must be new, part of an effort to expand business. Trainees can’t be replacement workers for existing positions.

Michigan’s law was modeled after a similar program Iowa began in 1983 where community colleges use bonds to purchase equipment and facilities, develop contracts with special trainers and private vendors and hire instructors for new training programs.

Since its inception, the Iowa program generated $600 million to finance 2,100 projects that created more than 140,000 jobs for the state.

When signing the legislation, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm pointed out that the state “must do everything we can to help our citizens get the training they need for good-paying jobs in this challenging global economy. These bills are another part of our plan to ensure that we have a strong workforce that can compete and win in the 21st century.”

Hopefully, Michigan will find the same success Iowa did in creating the New Jobs Training Program, but only time will tell.

What are your thoughts on Michigan’s New Jobs Training Program? With our current economic situation, do you think more states should develop similar programs?

How to deliver employee training like a ninja

Want to learn how to “kick-butt” when developing and delivering training programs?

Becoming a training ninja takes time, practice and a lot of patience, but you can start strengthening your skills with a new, free eBook from Chris Ferdinandi at Manager’s Sandbox.

Download Kung-Fu Training: The Art of Developing and Delivering Kick-Butt Training Programs, a practical guide to help you inspire people to do amazing things in your workplace.

Kung-Fu Training will help you reach that training black belt with information on how most trainers go wrong, how to inspire change and tips to perfect your presentation skills.

Quick, practical, informative and free - you can check it out here.

How successful on-boarding improves training retention

How well a new employee retains training is directly dependent on the success of your on-boarding program, according to a recent article in Restaurants & Institutions (R&I).

Even outside of the food service industry, both formal and informal on-boarding programs are vital to the training process. When businesses conquer on-boarding and new-hire training, new employees are more likely to make it through the first weeks of a job and start thinking long-term.

“Dean McSherry, an Addison, Texas-based restaurant consultant, suggests a multipronged strategy that covers much more than basic job training. Introducing new employees to key people, providing them with the right tools and integrating them into the company culture quickly will help ensure that they enjoy their work and succeed.”

Here’s how some of the most successful food service companies achieve success in on-boarding and training new employees:

• Ongoing training opportunities. As employees move up the ladder at Chipotle Mexican Grill, they take part in ongoing training opportunities to help them at each new step. The restaurant chain strives to make employees at all levels understand the meaningful opportunities at the company and all of the career paths they can work toward.


• Cool training tools. Embracing new technology has greatly improved on-boarding at the Atlanta-based Wing Zone. CEO Matt Friedman harnesses the power of new technology and the Internet to make training “modern, quick, consistent and effective.” New hires are put through a simple online course complete with videos on the history of the company and quizzes that introduce employees to the company and prepare them for the hands-on training to follow.


• Stars and training mentors. New hires at the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain work their way through the company’s “Rising Stars” program where employees earn apron stars as they complete each step of the training program. During their first 60 days, new employees are also matched with a manager in a buddy program to check in with trainees throughout the on-boarding process.


• An eye on employee health. Because some people will be at the company for decades, Cal Dining at the University of California, Berkely, has new hires work with ergonomists to learn the best ways to work without injuring themselves. Additionally, new hires receive a preliminary health screening to identify any potential injury risk.


• Focus on brand value. The casual-dining restaurant Houlihan’s trains new employees to understand how the restaurant’s brand image plays a key role in customer experience. Employees are trained to “sell the brand” in their on-boarding program. The company’s philosophy: “Treat managers well, and they will be happy. Ultimately, happy managers create happy employees, and happy employees, in turn, create satisfied customers.”

With the right tools and support at the very beginning, employees will be more likely to enjoy their work and succeed. How does your company successfully implement on-boarding and new-hire training to improve retention?

Employee engagement down, how training can help

With businesses across the country suffering under the flailing economy, now is not the time for employee engagement to start deteriorating. Unfortunately, experts say that’s exactly what’s happening.

Employee engagement levels are dropping across the board, revealing that 21% of U.S. workers actively disengaged, according to a recent national study by Modern Survey.

Notably fewer workers feel a strong sense of pride in their companies. Now only about half say they are willing to put in extra effort to help their company succeed and only about half say they intend to stay with their company for a long time.

“You can’t open a newspaper or surf the internet without being bombarded by headlines and stories about the country’s ever-deepening economic troubles. Month after month, we’ve all been learning about the subprime mortgage mess, plummeting property values, foreclosures, layoffs, and the collapse of some of our largest financial institutions. People are spending a lot more time worrying about how to make ends meet than they did just a year or two ago,” said Bruce Campbell, a Senior Consultant at Modern Survey.

Among a long list of unexpected costs, poor employee engagement can lead to unplanned absenteeism, a lack of teamwork, low productivity and damaged morale. Though we can’t do much about the nation’s economy, we can do something to improve employee engagement within our own organizations.


How training can help

Engage employees by providing opportunities where they can improve personal leadership skills. Leadership training gives employees who may be feeling stuck in their current position an outlet to explore the next step and the ambition needed to move up in the company.

Outside training courses and seminars can be expensive and require companies to dole out hundreds of dollars in travel expenses. The best way to keep costs low is to provide in-house employee training and put existing resources to good use.

An employee mentoring program is one low-cost and effective leadership training idea that can help boost employee engagement. Partner employees with managers and executives and have them shadow each other or work on a project together. Both partners will appreciate the change of pace and the employee will pick up valuable, hands-on leadership training that can’t be found at any off-site workshop.

Times are tough right now for everyone. Providing employees with leadership training opportunities will improve engagement and help your business come out on top when the storm clouds pass.


For more employee engagement ideas, check out these related posts:

Incentives and rewards: Now is the time to act

5 tips to build employee morale in a down economy

Corporate volunteering builds teamwork, improves employee retention

Employee incentive ideas on a budget

5 tips of employee training on a tight budget

How training can capitalize on employees’ changing lunch habits

The struggling economy is having a powerful impact on the way Americans spend money during the workday, according to Vault.com’s “Workday Cutbacks” survey. An estimated 80% of workers have changed their workday habits when it comes to food and drink in order to save money.

The most significant changes in food and drink habits during the workday include:

• Avoiding the vending machines (19%)
• Bringing lunch from home (61%)
• Cutting back on morning or afternoon coffee runs (28%)
• Eating or picking up from less expensive places for lunch (41%)
• Skipping the happy hour outing (23%)
• Haven’t changed a thing (20%)

With more employees opting to bring their lunch to work rather than going out to eat, training professionals can capitalize on employees’ changing lunch habits is by offering “lunch and learn” training sessions.

Lunch and learn training programs are generally more relaxed and less structured than normal corporate training, where attending employees can enjoy their brown bag lunch while learning something new.

Among other bonuses, in-house employee training saves businesses money on travel expenses and improves productivity by reducing the time employees spend away from their desks.

Common lunch and learn programs include:

Skills training. Depending on the nature of your business, skills training could range from instructing sales teams how to answer the phone correctly to leadership training for newly promoted managers.

Product training. Lunch and learn training sessions are a great way to introduce new products and services your company is developing. It can also be a great time to brainstorm new product ideas.

Professional training. Use the talent already in the building to enhance the professional development of other employees. Maybe there’s someone in accounting who could teach a course in managing money, or someone in HR that could teach employees how to improve their resume.

Everyday skills. Especially with the economy in downturn, employees are interested in learning skills like household budgeting and investing. Other everyday training opportunities include first aid, fire safety and self defense.

Just for fun. Take an office poll - what do employees want to learn? Have fun with training by allowing employees with a special talent to teach a classes from arts and crafts to wood carving.


Turn the lunchroom into a classroom and foster employee training and development with a lunch and learn program of your own. Have fun and create a culture of learning employees will appreciate.

Lacking training, workers feel unqualified for jobs

Top managers across the globe agree that training and development is an integral part of their organization’s strategy, but many of their employees feel unqualified to get the job done.

Whether you’re talking about Vice Presidential candidates or a new manager in the office, it turns out that a lack of experience and training is common in the workforce.

Nearly seven out of 10 workers have been asked to complete tasks without receiving appropriate training beforehand, according to a recent SkillSoft global survey.

“The survey also found that regardless of location and job title, the majority of workers think ongoing training and development, and the flexibility to take the training when necessary, are essential, no matter what the employee's position.”

Of North American workers, 68% said that training would have helped them before beginning certain tasks in their jobs.

The top 5 tasks managers are asked to do without adequate training:

1. Project management
2. Technical tasks
3. Managing people
4. Leadership
5. Compliance related tasks

The top functions within an organization where ongoing training and development is most important:

1. Supervisors (70%)
2. Customer Service Team (54%)
3. IT Team (52%)
4. Operations Team (52%)
5. Senior Managers (52%)

It is time that companies give employees the training and development they need to do their jobs correctly. Especially during tough times, where people are taking on more tasks as a result of layoffs and downsizing, employee training is essential to the success of your business.

Have you ever been put in a position where you felt unqualified? Do you feel people in your company lack the experience to excel in their jobs?

Training for training sake? Improve training ROI

By sending people to seminars and training courses you expect them to come out as better leaders, better employees and better supervisors. The trainee may seem changed for the first few days they return to the office, but their excitement dwindles and things soon go back to the way they were before.

Without hard evidence that training is making a difference, why do businesses keep spending millions on training and development each year? Are we just training for training sake?

Ron Ulrici from R and S Associates brought up this big HR mistake in a recent post, suggesting that training will only be a success if we include it in the overall system within our organizations.

Building on Ulrici’s advice, here are some ways to improve your training ROI and ensure you’re not just training for training’s sake:

Get managers to buy-in. Before sending anyone out to participate in outside training, make sure their boss knows what the training involves and what they can do to foster newly-learned behavior the employee may returned with.

Outline desired goals. HR, trainees and managers should meet prior to a training course to outline clear expectations for employees after completing a training program. Defining training goals before sending employees through the program will create a benchmark to help measure employee progress.

Measure effectiveness in performance appraisals. When appraisal time comes around, address how well or not an employee was able to implement training in their work. Measure the progress a trainee has made and how well they attained their goals.

Follow-up. After completing a training program, HR should meet with each trainee and their supervisors to measure how effective the training was, if the employee is putting their knowledge to use and to asses any difficulties the employee may be having applying the training to their job.

Encourage practice. Work with managers to be sure trainees have a chance to practice what they learned when they get back to the office. Find practical ways for employees to put their knowledge to action with small projects or presentations.

Preview seminars and workshops. Don’t encourage outside training programs before you know exactly what they’re all about. If the messages delivered in the program or seminar don’t match your business culture, the message will be lost. Even worse, employees may be punished for exhibiting behavior learned during training.


Forgetting the follow-up is a sure way to lose any new habits an employee may have learned during training. Get everyone on board and prepared for follow-up training to ensure you’re not just training for training sake.

Monday training links and questions to consider

A few training-related questions to think about this afternoon:

Is there a missing link in your management training program? Does outsourcing employee training help us focus on the bottom line? How do you handle obstacles in business? Can “key employee” incentives be dangerous? Did corporations forget what fuels economies?

Below are a few great posts from across the blogosphere to spur discussion and decide for yourself:

Jim Giuliano at HR Morning shares the missing link to proper managerial training - customer service.

More large, multi-national firms are outsourcing employee training in order to stay focused on strategy and the bottom line, according to a new study outlined by Human Resource Executive Online.

Don’t let small obstacles sidetrack big hopes, says Erika Anderson. She reminds us to test your flexibility and focus on strategy when unforeseen obstacles crop up.

Are you a good trainer or do you simply have good platform skills? The HR Bartender explains the difference.

Be careful with "key employee" incentive plans, warns Ann Bares at Compensation Force. Business success is “based on the efforts of many, not just the appointed few.”

Are corporations running on empty because they forgot what really fuels the economy? Dan Stafford asks how our workforce was driven to the point of physical and financial exhaustion in a thought-provoking post at Bella Ciao.

Teens find early career training at business summer camp

Business summer camp ... sounds like every teen’s dream of an awesome summer vacation, right?

At least one group of kids in Silicon Valley seem to think so. Whether it’s the nature of the area they live in or an inherited drive to succeed, teens from the high-tech hub are opting-out of a lazy summer at the beach for one spent learning how to run a business.

At Camp BizSmart, parents pay $750 to send their kids to a two-week summer camp that focuses on market analysis, branding and discussions on ROI. The day camp covers all the businesses basics any success-driven, miniature Bill Gates would love to spend their summer learning.

With national teen employment at the lowest level in the past 60 years, maybe starting kids out early with business summer camp isn’t such a bad idea. Research shows that teens who work more in high school have an easier transition into the labor market after graduation.

Similar state-funded teen work programs across the country may not be as structured as camp, but work to develop teen job skills. Programs like Pennsylvania’s Technology Work Experience Internship Program and Boston’s Hope Line give teens the training and resources to help them get hired.

Our country’s next batch of successful CEOs have started training today, and they’ve started early. Many of today’s teens work hard in school and study for the SATs until the point of burnout, don’t they have the right to slack off during the summer? Do you think business summer camp is giving kids a head start in the corporate world, or should we just let kids be kids?