Overcoming the 4 Biggest Hurdles to Employee Training

Training your employees doesn’t just make them more proficient in what they do. It makes them more engaged. It helps them feel more valued, and thus happier at work. It shows that you’re investing in their future, and it empowers them to do their work confidently.

Most business owners know this, which is why, if you ask them, they’ll readily agree that employee training is crucial. However, for many business owners, actually implementing employee training is a challenge. The advantages of employee training are well known, but the hurdles are significant—and on a pragmatic level, a lot of businesses just don’t have the structures or procedures in place to accommodate in-house training.

But even the biggest obstacles to employee training can be overcome—and we’ll explain how.

What are the Most Significant Obstacles to Effective Employee Training?

The four most frequently cited hurdles to effective training include:

Time. Some small business owners simply don’t have the time to invest in training their people—which is understandable. The important thing to realize is that you don’t have to provide the training yourself, and, in fact, it’s often more advantageous to bring in an outsider.

Some ways to mitigate the time problem include:

• Invest in webinars or in-house seminars for your team
• Provide opportunities for certain departments or employees to attend outside conferences or workshops
• Implement a mentor program in your workplace

These methods are effective, and require minimal time commitment from the company leadership.

Turnover. Another major hurdle to effective training is the idea that you’re going to invest in training employees only to see a number of them leave your company, taking those skills to other employers. It’s certainly true that employees will leave, sooner or later, and there’s not much you can do about that—but remember that training is an investment in employee retention. By showing your employees that you care about empowering them and developing them, you’re reducing turnover, not courting a higher level of risk.

Information overload. Depending on your industry, you may have a lot of training needs—safety training, legal compliance, on the job skills, and so forth. Some business owners fear that they’re burdening their employees with too much professional development, and that it all has an inundating effect over time.

But this isn’t an argument against training, not really. Rather, it’s an argument for better prioritizing your training, and ensuring that you’re judicious in how you choose to develop your team.

Employee diversity. A final consideration is the fact that all employees are, well, different—and blanket approaches to training can therefore seem a bit obtuse. But that’s ultimately not a great reason to avoid training, as the sheer number of training resources available today ensure that you can always calibrate your training initiative to meet the specific needs of your employees.

And certainly, the ACES team has a number of highly specified training resources that span industries; contact us to learn more about them!