HR question. How to build an employee training system in a company

Live and learn. This saying is as old as the world, but does not lose its relevance today. Moreover: today, training and advanced training is necessary, like air, for any specialist - because everything changes very quickly, barely published information immediately becomes outdated, and the latest technologies already yesterday become the day of presentation to the public. In business, training has long become an integral part of the activities of many companies and is part of their development strategy, because everyone understands that the success of an organization depends on the continuous professional growth of its staff. A lot of money is allocated for training programs, trainings, seminars, conferences, but not everyone understands how to evaluate the effectiveness of these investments. The intricacies of internal and external training, the standards for the development of employees, the nuances of assessing the level of their professionalism and much more are described by a business trainer, the head of the training center of the Siberian Coast company Konstantin Maltsev in his book “Valuable shot. How to build an effective training system in a company. " Its value lies in the fact that it is built solely on the experience of the author, who has over 250 conducted corporate and open trainings on sales, negotiating and leadership skills.

It is believed that the process of education and vocational training should continue throughout a person’s life to help him adequately respond to technological and social changes, to fully realize his potential.

Cadres decide everything

Each year, company executives take more and more ambitious plans to sell (goods or services) and capture the market. Lack of development, in essence, means stagnation and a countdown to the existence of the company. In modern conditions of rapid obsolescence of professional skills, the company's ability to constantly improve the skills of its employees is one of the most important factors for long-term success. Training has transformed into an ongoing process in which all employees are involved. Questions, why, when and how to train personnel should be laid down in the company's development strategy.

Caring for staff development is especially important in a situation of staff shortages, and the slogan “Cadres decide everything” is now especially relevant, given the demographic situation in Russia - a decrease in the working-age population.

Attract or teach - many managers ask this question. On the one hand, if the company has the means, the acquisition of a specialist is much more profitable than training him from scratch. But on the other hand, the level of tasks facing the business may require continuous improvement even from highly qualified specialists, therefore, it will be necessary to pay attention to training within the company. The specialists attracted by themselves know their value, do not owe anything to the next employer, so they can easily transfer to competitors. The employee trained by you knows the specifics of your business well, has a certain “attachment” to the company and the team, which is facilitated by a competent policy of retaining specialists (if it does not exist, you will become a forge of personnel for competitors) - conditions for career and professional growth.

Features of adult education

Market changes are constant, meaning managers need to systematically learn and relearn themselves and train their subordinates. It's important to consider that adult learning has its own unique characteristics. Pedagogy even has a special branch of didactics called andragogy. The andragogic model of learning assumes that the learner is responsible for defining the scope of their learning, choosing methods, planning deadlines, and evaluating results. They act as the "primary driver" of learning, while the teacher plays the role of facilitator of the learning process, an "architect" who creates new forms, methods, and opportunities.

The most effective methods for teaching adults are active methods: presentations, seminars, business trainings, business and role-playing games, case studies, small group discussions, modeling and project implementation, action learning. In business education, the teacher’s task is to organize the learning process so that students become “co-authors” of their own training.

Business education differs from traditional academic education in its approaches, methods and distribution of responsibility for the result, as well as motivation for learning, which is present in adults, but in children and adolescents, as a rule, not. Adults want to learn if they see the need for training and the possibility of applying its results to improve their performance.

When organizing business training, it is necessary to consider the following features of adults:

•  Conscious attitude to the process of learning;

• need for independence;

• the need for meaningful learning (to solve an important problem and achieve a specific goal), which provides motivation;

• practical orientation in relation to training, the desire to apply the acquired knowledge, skills;

• life experience is an important source of learning;

• the impact on the learning process of professional, social, domestic and temporary factors.

A mature person has many family and social responsibilities, so he studies on the job. Adults learn new knowledge and skills at different speeds, so they need an individual approach.

We teach on axioms

Konstantin Maltsev derives his own rules - axioms, without which it is impossible to build a training system in a company.

Axiom 1. Responsibility for the development and formation of skills lies with the employee himself and his immediate supervisor.

A person has a motivation for development either or not. It is impossible to develop from under a stick, by order. In Western management, the section “Personnel Development” clearly says: to develop and train an employee is possible only when the employee himself consciously WANTS this.

The main rule and the main tool of the leader in the process of employee development is his own example. In practice, it is often necessary to face the fact that managers do not really want to develop their employees. Main reasons:

•  Do not know how to develop;

• they themselves do not develop and do not understand why to develop someone;

• Fear of a smarter and more developed employee

• they are afraid of what to do and how to work with a developed employee;

• they are afraid that a developed employee will take their place.

Axiom 2. For any position, the tasks performed and, accordingly, the knowledge and skills necessary to perform these tasks should be distributed as follows:

• Standard Level: knowledge and skills required to perform 60% of standard tasks for this position.

• Professional Level: Knowledge and skills required to perform 30% of the more complex tasks for this position.

• Master Level: Knowledge and skills required to solve the 10% most complex problems for this position.

Different tasks require different qualifications and are divided by the degree of complexity in the ratio 60: 30: 10. Consider this system as an example of the position of sales representative. Imagine that you are the head of a team of sales representatives, in your area of ​​responsibility are 600 outlets with which you work. All your customers can be divided into three groups:

• 60% - these are customers who take the goods regularly, have normal relationships with them and require standard skills to work with them;

• 30% are clients with whom problematic situations arise from time to time: they insist on additional discounts and individual promotions, forbid you to independently display goods on shelves, take only the most popular goods for sale, refuse the assortment. To work with them requires additional knowledge and skills;

• 10% - these are customers who require special attention and constantly expose some conditions. To work with them requires an even higher professional level.

To serve all these customers, you will need a team of sales representatives consisting of 60% of employees with qualifications of the Standard level (4-5 people), 30% of the Professional level (2-3 people) and 10% of the Master level (1- 2 person). At the same time, it is important to understand that if you load your highly qualified employee who needs to solve the most difficult tasks with routine and working with ordinary clients, he will get bored very soon and you risk losing him.

Axiom 3. It is imperative to evaluate the development of professionalism of employees.

Various methods are used to evaluate, their purpose is to identify the knowledge and skills of employees, which allows to obtain detailed, objective and structured information about the abilities of the staff. A correct assessment is very important, as its criteria greatly affect motivation.

Elements of a training system

Any training system in a company, regardless of its features, must contain three important elements:

1. What to train employees.

2. Who, how and how often should conduct training.

3. Assessment of knowledge and skills of each employee.

All three elements are interconnected with each other, and if at least one of them is broken, then the whole system will not work properly.

Key to Competency

In most companies, for each position, they do not prescribe knowledge and skills by level, but key competencies (terms of reference, area of ​​responsibility) that an employee should possess. Practice shows that far from always employees understand exactly what skills they need to develop in relation to a specific competency.

In order to make competencies easier to understand and easier to develop, they can be described by indicators: what is the norm, what is a disadvantage, and what is an excess. But this form is also not always clear and clear. Therefore, Konstantin Maltsev suggests writing down any competency in the following form:

Competence = Knowledge + Basic skills (Н1 + Н2)

+ New skills (Н3 + Н4);

where

• knowledge – knowledge in a certain area related to this competence;

• basic skills – understandable skills that the employee has encountered before and should already master perfectly (at least at the level of conscious competence);

• new skills – clear skills that have appeared in this competency.

Any new competency, according to the author, at 50-70% consists of understandable basic skills that an employee should already have. Such a breakdown of competence makes it possible to analyze what knowledge and skills the training participants already possess, and which for them will be either completely new or at the level of conscious incompetence. With this information, a trainer or training department can properly build training material.

What to teach, who to teach

When you have determined what knowledge and skills (for each position and for each level) you need to train your employees, you must do the following:

• determine how much knowledge you are going to give your employees to perform work duties, and in what sequence you will do it;

• select or develop technologies by which each “understandable” skill should be developed;

• determine who will teach the class and how;

• determine how often to conduct classroom and workplace training for employees for each position.

Any company, on the one hand, wants its employees to develop, on the other, it’s not ready to take them away from work too often and for a long time. A compromise must be sought, one of them is a modular training system. Each module should consist of 2-3 parts:

1. Knowledge + technology for their assimilation.

2. Skill + skill development technology.

3. Practical tasks for the development of the skill (there should be so many that every participant of the 3-5 training can apply the skill directly during the training).

Better and more effective if the training of employees will not be carried out by an external coach, but by their immediate supervisor. Classroom instruction should alternate with on-the-job training, with the regularity of the second type being 2-3 times higher than the first.

Advantages of a modular training system through direct managers:

• efficiency and timeliness of training;

• developing the skills necessary to solve current business problems;

• unity of approach in theory and practice;

• the responsibility of the leader himself for the result of training and the formation of skills;

• direct impact on business results.

How to assess the level of professionalism

Assessing the level of professionalism of your employees is not an easy task. Most often, personnel certification is carried out for this. When choosing methods for its implementation, it is important not to lose sight of its goals, namely: assessing the effectiveness of employees and their compliance with their positions, as well as identifying promising employees to further improve their skills and advancement. The certification procedure consists of two components: labor assessment and personnel assessment.

Labor evaluation - the goal is to compare the actual content, quality, volume and intensity of personnel work with the planned ones.

Personnel assessment – ​​the goal is to study the degree of readiness of an employee to perform the specific type of activity in which he is engaged, to identify the level of his potential capabilities in terms of growth prospects (rotation), as well as the development of personnel measures necessary to achieve the goals of personnel policy.

In most cases, companies evaluate both the results of work and the personal and business qualities of employees that influence the achievement of these results.

All methods of assessment can be divided into methods of individual assessment of personnel, based on a study of the personal qualities of the employee, and group assessment methods, based on a comparison of the effectiveness of employees within the group.

The most common methods for evaluating staff:

1. Questioning Method.

2. Descriptive assessment method.

3. Classification method (based on the ranking of certified employees according to the principle from best to worst).

4. Rating, or comparison method (based on the assessment of the employee's suitability for the position held).

5. The assessment method for the "decisive" situation (used in assessments made by the head, not colleagues and subordinates).

6. The method of rating behavioral attitudes (based on the use of “decisive” situations from which the business and personal qualities required from the employee are derived; an expensive and time-consuming assessment method).

7. Behavioral observation scale method.

8. The method of questionnaires and comparative questionnaires.

9. Interview (the method is borrowed from sociology).

10. 360 degrees of assessment method (an employee is evaluated by his supervisor, his colleagues and subordinates, the results are processed by a computer to maintain anonymity; it gives a comprehensive assessment of the attestation).

11. Independent Judge Method.

12. Testing.

13. Evaluation center method (commonly used to evaluate senior staff).

14. The method of business games.

15. Method for assessing the achievement of goals (management method by setting goals).

16. Assessment method based on competency models.

This article was published in the 134 issue of the print version of the magazine.