Successful Personnel Training and Development – Soft and Hard Skills
How to train your personnel?
In no case, you should allow your employees to feel themselves stagnant having no development perspectives, as this greatly reduces motivation, morale and therefore the work productivity. That’s why a constant process of personnel training and development with all staff involved is crucial for every business. Let’s start with personnel training definition. A personnel training means training of employees on operating procedures, standards, and routines in order to make their work more effective. This is quite a vague explanation, giving a little help in practice in the organization of this process. So, let's take a look at important aspects related to personnel training.
First, it is necessary to find an answer to the three most important questions:
- What to teach?
- How to teach?
- Who and when to teach?
Now let us consider these issues of employee training one by one.
What to teach? Hard skills vs. soft skills
In order to answer this seeming simple at first glance question, you need to understand that your employee is not only an expert in a particular field, that is, a "person-function," but also a member of the team, a human-being. That is, any employee has so-called hard skills (professional competencies), and soft skills (determining his/her ability to work in a team, regardless of specialization). Both of those are important for the coordinated work of your team. And if it is quite easy to estimate the professional competence of a particular person, the level of soft skills can be assessed only after a certain period. It is very important to pay attention to the development of both hard skills and soft skills.
How to train? Courses, training, seminars, and self-study
Having decided upon the subject of training, we pass to the consideration of types of personnel training (forms). Now there are quite a lot of different solutions for personnel training available. They can be divided into the following groups:
- Self-education;
- Online training;
- Traditional training programs;
As for self-education, it is quite clear: a specialist him/herself finds the necessary materials, and organizes the whole learning process for him/herself. This is the cheapest, but also the least effective way, besides with this approach soft skills are almost impossible to improve.
Online courses and training. Now there are quite a few platforms for online learning (Coursera, Futurelearn). Efficiency is higher than with self-training, and most often free of charge. But the lack of direct contact limits the possibilities of this form of training.
Traditional training programs are the most effective form of personnel training. They are carried out in the form of seminars, lectures, training, and workshops. Allows you to train both hard skills and soft skills fully.
When and whom to train?
The answer to this question can be formulated as follows: train everyone in turn. The best solution is to create a kind of training schedule for the entire team, in which each employee will know exactly which courses and when he/she should pass. You can involve all employees in the development of this schedule, in order to take into account their personal interests and wishes.
Selection of a comprehensive solution for personnel training and development in the UAE
So, we have analyzed various aspects of personnel training. And now we will show how you can solve the issue of personnel training in Dubai, UAE. In order to do this, we will use the services of one of the private institutions – the Atton Institute. Here both the solutions for Hard skills training (Marketing, Sales, Customer experience, etc.) and soft skills (Business communication, Leadership management) are provided. Training takes place in the form of courses, both for individual listeners and for a group (which is convenient when planning the simultaneous training of the whole department), in addition, the programs are designed in such a way that it takes several days (up to 10 in a complex program) to acquire the necessary information. Thus, it is possible to resolve such a complicated task of personnel training complexly and quickly.