The benefits of training
As the economy is slowing down, many companies begin to reduce costs by stop provide training and lay off workers. While reduce cost to ensure the survival of the company is important but reducing trainings will increase the company risks. By not provide the needed training, workers may not be able to keep their skills up to date when company needs to grow. By reducing the number of workers, company is forcing more works among fewer workers. What will happen when some of them decide to leave the company? What will happen if other workers cannot take over their works? In that case company will have a big gap that no one can fill. Without proper training, no one can help each other when it is needed. Even the company hires replacements but new workers must learn how to do the work. Without proper training how could they work since no one could assist them? When they make mistakes, fixing would be very expensive.
From a strategic viewpoint, in bad time company should expanding training, not reducing it. This is a key investment to prepare for the future when economy improves. In bad time things are slow, workers have more time to learn, it is the best time for additional skills trainings. This is the time where new technology training is important to keep workers’ skills up to date. More training reduce the risk of workers turnover as it sends a strong message to workers that the company is planning to grow and invest in workers’ skills. This will reduce the fears and uncertainty among workers.
Software technology always changes fast and it is important to keep up with the change. Successful software companies always make training a top priority. The best way to keep workers from leaving is having the best training program. The simple reason is technology workers always want to keep their skills current. They want to work for company that helps them to learn new skills. If workers start to talk about how good the training is, company will not have problem recruiting new workers. A manager disagreed: “If we train them, they will leave for another better paid job.” My answer is: “Unless you pay them a lot less than your competitors, nobody would leave a job just for few dollars more. The reason workers leave because they are not happy with the working condition or the way managers treat them. Instead of worry about invest in training, company should worry about the way it operates and how it treats workers.”
Knowledge is what students learn in school, which is mostly theory (object-oriented concepts, system design, data structures, structure programming etc.) Theory is easy to teach, easy to discuss, but difficult to experience since it is just formulas and words. Skills are the application of knowledge into something and be able to do it correctly. To develop a skill, students need time to practice. Practice is about making mistakes, not one time but many times, until they do not make mistake anymore and that is skill. There is a big difference between knowing and doing and unless you do it, you do not have skills.
For example: To be a better programmer, you must write code. The more coding mistakes you make, the better you learn about coding. Experience only came through writing code, thousand lines of code and makes many mistakes etc. You cannot learn coding from books, you cannot learn coding by reading articles, you must write code; Design experience only came through drawing many diagrams, hundreds of them etc. There is no better way to do it. That is why the best teaching method is “Learning by Doing”. The only way to learn is to practice over and over until you do it right.
Training is important and practice is the best way to acquire skills. By continue to provide training, the company will grow and that is the best way to survive this economic crisis. When the economy improves, the company is ready to grow with better skilled workers than others and that will determine who will be more successful.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
