Training is a Waste. WHY?

Each and every company spend huge sum for giving training for their employees. In-house, external, local, foreign training is given to employees to improve their skills, capabilities, professional experience, etc. 
But actually are those trainings effective? do those trainings improve the organization's profitability? 


The ultimate question remains. 

Why do companies give training to their employees???

There are many reasons which employers can give answering why they give training. Here are few answers which tell that the training given are useless and a waste of money. 

Employers use training as a motivational tool

There are many employers who send their workers for outside training to motivate them. They try to use training as a motivational tool. But it is NOT. Training is never a motivation to employees. If there is a passion for the employee which the training is about, he will learn something, and if it is not the training is only will become a burden to him/her. 

Therefore, re-consider before sending your employees to training to motivate them. Use the money and throw a party which will motivate them for sure. 

Employers use training to improve the Employee Profiles

Every employer like to have high profile people in their work places as it is seen as a great achievement of the top management and of the Head of HR. But it is a useless work. Improving your employees' personal profiles will not give you anything profitable for the business. 

Therefore, DO NOT train people just for improve them only for the name. 

Giving generic training to all employees

Various people are having different capabilities, different mind sets, different job functions, etc inside an organization. Giving all the same training is totally a waste of money which most organizations tend to do always. 

For instance, you have mechanics who are 100% of the time working with machines and supervisors who manage the mechanics. Giving HR/PR training and for all those 2 teams will be a waste of money when the mechanics are considered as they cannot apply any PR skills against the machines. 

Therefore, giving generic training to employees should be always prevented and you should carry out training to employees considering their requirements. 

Yes. There are general trainings which should be given to each and every employee of your organization like safety, housekeeping, etc. Those should be properly identified and segregated by your self. 

Not identifying the correct Skill gap

This is one of the major mistakes done by employers when giving employees training. 

Identification of the training needs of employees is a must for all organizations. If we cannot identify the correct training requirement for each and every employee separately, the training we give them will be a waste as most of the time the given training will not help the employees in improving their daily work activities. 

Therefore, the correct training needs of each and every employee should be identified via a detailed skills matrix evaluation and a training needs identification system. During that evaluation, the employees' current knowledge, capabilities, skills, weaknesses, in-capabilities, his/her job functions should be thoroughly evaluated. The identified skill gap should be answered by the training to be given. 

No proper infrastructure is available for training

To carry out a successful training programme, there are many required infrastructures.

1. A competent trainer in the related subject
2. A good place to give the training effecttively
3. required training materials like multimedia, sketches, models, disassembled parts, etc. 

Without these facilities a training would not be successful. 

If the trainer cannot convey the required message to his audience, or if the trainer is not competent enough, the training would not be effective. 

If the location of the training is with huge noise disturbances or if the location is hot and sweating, the effectiveness of the training will be reduced drastically. 

If you are going to make a training program to educate technicians on parts of an engine and you do not have a dis-assembled engine block and/or multimedia presentations of the operations of the engine, the training would be a total waste. 

No tangible benefits are visible after training

After completing the training, the employee will get back to his day today work at the work place and the learnt things will be eventually forgotten. He/she will not implement anything from the learning as the things learnt are not linked to his/her job profile or the things learnt may be needed in very rare situations or he/she had not been asked to do anything with the learning received. 

So, there will be nothing happening after the training as nothing is being improved. 

As the training should be targeted to reduce the skill gap of the employee and should be targeting a specific KPI (Key Performance Indicator or a project. A KPI  or a project should be assigned to the employee to carry out with the learning of the training he/she received. Then with the implementation of the action plans set for the project, the organization will be able to get tangible benefits from the training given. 

No measurement system to evaluate the effectiveness of the training

As stated in the previous point too, as there are nothing happening, there will be nothing to measure or evaluate to check whether the employee had got anything from the received training and whether he/she have made any improvements with his work or attitudes. 

Just sending a form asking comments of the employee, supervisor and the department head cannot evaluate the employees' training as comments are just ideas comes to the minds of the people. 

A proper evaluation criteria should be layed down to check the effectiveness of the given training with assigning a KPI for improvement or a project to implement to the employee. The progress and the success rate of the KPI/project will evaluate the effectiveness of the training. Or else, OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency) of a machine/production line should be increased with the application of training given, if the employee is from a production department. 

So, 
you see that just giving training of sending employees for training programmes is not what shall be done. 

A training to be effective and profitable to an organization, 
A good evaluation should be carried out initially and the skill gap should be identified for each and every employee. 
Considering those factors "what to be given to whom" should be decided.
Not only that, a training to be profitable to a business, a post evaluation should be carried out on the employees who received the training and the employees should be encouraged to implement what they learnt. 

Let's discuss more on how to identify training needs and how to make training more effective, in the future.