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Home 5 Blog 5 Rethinking Training for SMEs and Enterprises: 5 Steps to Improve Learning Outcome and Increase Return on Investment

Rethinking Training for SMEs and Enterprises: 5 Steps to Improve Learning Outcome and Increase Return on Investment

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IQ Dynamics By Lim Say Ping

In recent years, Singapore has seen a growing emphasis on training, spurred by the challenges posed by an aging workforce and the nation’s ever-expanding global presence. Both the government and private sectors have emphasized the need for upskilling and reskilling, with grants and incentives being made available to promote skill development and improve learning outcomes. Within most organizations, the responsibility for coordinating and facilitating these initiatives falls squarely on the shoulders of the HR department.

However, despite the availability of government grants and a clear need for training, several issues persist, prompting organizations to rethink their approach to training, especially for SMEs:

  • Resource Constraints: Many SMEs struggle to implement comprehensive employee training programs due to the challenges of managing employee absences during training hours. Budget constraints further exacerbate this issue, which can be partially solved by taking advantage of the many government grants available. 
  • Measuring Training Outcomes: Measuring the actual impact and learning outcomes of training programs can be challenging. It is often unclear whether employees have truly improved their skills as a result of training.
  • Alignment with Business Goals: Training often focuses on addressing immediate skills gaps such as soft skills, domain knowledge, transferable skills, or a combination of the courses. However, this might not always align with the organization’s long-term strategic goals in terms of developing employees to be more effective and able to take on more responsibilities. 
  • Tailored Training: The soft skills and transferable skills that are important for certain job roles are seldom tailored to the individual employee and, thus, may reduce the maximum benefits of training and improve learning outcomes.
  • Theory vs. Practice: There are gaps in terms of theory learned in the class and application of learned materials in real life in order to optimize the outcome of learning. In some situations, the training does not provide sufficient tailored practical training situations to enhance learning.
  • Lack of Supervisory Support: Supervisors and managers may not have the skills or time to tailor suitable individualized training programs and on-the-job practice to acquire sufficient skills timely.

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If the training and development programs are fully and effectively implemented, the benefits to the organization are immense. An efficient and effective workforce can serve as a competitive advantage and play a pivotal role in attracting and retaining talent. 

What are the few things that can be done differently to optimize the benefits of training in the face of all these issues? One should look at 3 key elements:

Strategy alignment:

Training programs should be designed to align with company strategy and individual employee aspirations to enhance the results of the training.

Targeted approach:

 The training programs should be prioritized according to the needs of each individual employee.

Closed loop Feedback:

The HR and management team should constantly monitor the progress of the training programs and its impact on the employee’s performance.

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Optimizing Training for SMEs and Enterprises

There are 5 steps that can help to set up a comprehensive and cost-effective training framework and programs for the company:

1. Strategy

Clearly define your organization’s business vision and strategy for the next 3-5, this will be used to produce a blueprint for your people strategy and improve learning outcomes.

2. Job roles and competency framework

Set up clear company definitions of job roles and job responsibilities with a clear competency framework to enable the management team to identify the competency and skills gaps for each of the employees.

Additionally, implement a company performance appraisal framework and process with the help of appraisal software to automate the process. The company goals and individual performance objectives are set to align with the company strategy. Using comprehensive and integrated training management software (sometimes known as a learning management system), the individual competency gaps can be jointly identified by the employee and the manager or supervisor through interaction during the appraisal management processes.

3. Bridging of gaps and training

These competency gaps can then be used to identify training courses required by matching the recommended training given by the training management system and the competency gaps. The training management software and process should allow flexibility to incorporate ad hoc training courses as well.

Training courses (external or internal or e-learning or blended learning) can be carefully selected to enroll the employee in. At the same time, practical on-the-job assessment rubrics after the training course should also be specified. In each course or practical work, the outcome (or expected learning points) should be spelled out.

4. Feedback

The ideal feedback after training should be done using a 360-feedback loop by both employee and management which for the latter would come in the form of performance appraisals. The basic concept is to have some form of feedback regarding the outcome of the training and practice and feed it into the training management system so that analysis can be made to improve the correlation between training, practical, and the acquiring of competency. The result of which would result in more effective training.

5. Automation with flexibility and good tracking & reporting

A training management system (or learning management software) that is tightly integrated with the performance appraisal system and HRMS can automate the tasks and make the process of implementing the training programs easier. The training management software should also assist the company in scheduling, budgeting, applying, and claiming grants from government departments such as WSG. (formerly part of WDA Singapore). In summary, it should automate the tasks associated with training in terms of competency framework and identification of gaps for EACH employee and help the employee to come out with both short and long-term tailored training plans. It should also be able to provide alerts and notifications, track attendance claims government grants, and feedback. It should also offer good tracking and reporting functions to enable management to make decision on fine-tuning training frameworks and programs. Typically, these software tools (training management system, performance appraisal system, and HRMS) can be on the cloud and one can start with Software as a service (SaaS) with very little upfront investment, ie pay-as you use.

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To note, these steps do not quite solve the issues faced by SMEs regarding the lack of resources to “stand in” while the selected employees are away from their jobs for training. To make things more difficult, there are many different schemes offered by the Singapore government to help fund training. The challenge is knowing what and how to take advantage of all these good schemes. These are all real obstacles to overcome to use training to improve productivity and competitiveness. In some cases, this may be a means of survival in this tough business climate. We will have to examine to see what solutions various SMEs in Singapore can come up with to solve this issue and use training help to increase revenue, and profitability and attract and retain talent. We will discuss more of these in the near future.

 If you’d like to find out more about HRiQ’s suite of powerful comprehensive HRMS and Talent Management System, contact us here.

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