Many organisations such as the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and Business Link have recently published articles promoting the need for continued staff training and personal development to help businesses through the recession and out the other side.

When companies are considering sending their staff on new learning activities, whether it is a management training course or sales training course, they have to consider class sizes.

Some training providers offer bespoke training courses for selected staff from one company, and others invite students to participate in courses that contain a cross section of people from different companies.

Class size can have an impact on your learning experience. Smaller bespoke courses can be more easily tailored to the specific organisation, and may provide more tuition with a lower pupil teacher ratio.

Larger mixed class sizes can mean that only the more vocal students get the most out of the learning experience. However, it’s also a good opportunity for people to mix with other employees and share experience and knowledge they may otherwise not normally have access to. Larger classes can also be a more cost effective solution.

Whether you choose to send your employees on a small intensive course, or a larger mixed tuition environment, investing in new learning and development is bound to pay future dividends for your company.

One of the most effective ways for managers and subordinates alike to improve their personal development is through goal setting. Essentially, setting ones personal and business goals is the first step towards continuous improvement; you have know where you are and where you’d like to be – then you can indentify how to get there.

However, setting the right type of goals to ensure personal development growth is important. Let’s say for example you want to undertake a sales training course or seminar, many would just make their goal to ‘learn as much as possible’. This is perfectly acceptable, but it is also slightly intangible.

The best way to set yourself a goal is to have a clear and definable outcome in mind. So you might decide that you want to come away from a sales training course with three new ways in which you are going to sell your product or service. Or you might decide that you want to apply your new learning to improve your quarterly sales results by twenty percent.

By narrowing down your outcomes, preferably into measurable ones, you will have a much better personal development focus, and are much more likely to achieve your goals. So ‘getting better’ is not good enough, say to yourself ‘I am going to get better, and this is going to be demonstrated by …….’

Knowledge is most useful when it becomes practicable.

It may not be everyone’s favourite daily paper, but with a huge readership, the tabloid’s comments can’t be ignored. This is particularly the case when it comes to their announcement of their ‘Wooden Spoon Award’ for businesses with poor customer service.

BT are at the top of the list when it comes to criticism over their customer service provision, with a huge amount of complaints received – over three thousand. The main gripes centred around the corporate giant’s use of automated switchboards and overseas call centres.

Next in line for a wooden spoon spanking was Abbey, some of whose customers are aggrieved with administrative delays and errors. Allegedly that chestnut of an excuse is used all too often; “it’s the computer system’s fault”.

Third on the list was Virgin Media, which whilst spending on huge advertising and promotion campaigns are apparently falling short of meeting some of their client’s expectations.

Whether or not your average business leader or manager takes these kinds of polls seriously is debatable. What is not debateable is the fact in times of such economic hardship for businesses, it’s more important than ever that they invest in the training and personal development of their staff to ensure a high standard of customer service.

It costs a lot less to keep a good customer than to find a new one.

In 2004 the government commissioned the life peer, Sandy Leitch, to review the UK’s skills needs in the long term. When it was completed in December 2006 it made for interesting reading. The overall conclusion was that in order for the UK to be on a par with world leaders by 2020, the skills, training and development of its workforce must be doubled. It advised that the responsibility for this development must lie across all sectors, employers and individuals as well as the government itself.

As we enter 2009, things don’t seem to be improving at a fast enough rate; the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) 2008 survey on ‘learning and development’ raises some issues:

- Concern about employability skills and general levels of education. 66% reported the absence of communication skills, 53% reported a general lack of work ethic and 20% were concerned at a lack of customer service skills.
- A discomfort with the Government skills agenda based as it is on ‘Train to Gain’ with its qualifications focus.
- The overall level of employer disengagement with the skills agenda as it stands. 53% of respondents indicated that the skills agenda wasn’t at the forefront of their thinking by replying that their learning and development activity had ‘not at all’ been influenced by the Leitch agenda.

As we enter a harsh recession, with unemployment reaching record figures, many business leaders and economists alike feel that it has never been more important for the companies to train to improve their workforce skills, and individuals to invest in their personal development to remain competitive.

So, while managers are looking to cut back on their company’s expenditure, the training and development of their staff should not be pushed aside.

Businesses (and management training courses) are beginning to focus more on core principles to reach goals, and not on a rigid set of procedures and dictums. This is enabling key staff to chart a straighter course for navigating their companies through the choppy waters of the economic slowdown.

In a previous article, we look at the critical need an organisation has for effective planning. Let’s look at another core function:

Effective Organising

Once a company has clearly identified a set of goals it wishes to pursue, and spent time planning ahead, the next steps is allocating the resources necessary to achieve those goals. Thus, effective organising comes into play and people, money and equipment is distributed in the best way possible by management and key staff.

It’s interesting to think about the Organisational Chart at this point. Most people think of it as a pictorial or diagrammatical representation of the hierarchical structure of a company, and its chain of command. However, as its name suggest, it should be used to ‘Organise’ the company staff. Typically in today’s fast-paced environment, management and leaders regularly re-structure Organisational Charts to better ‘organise’ the company to meet new challenges.

Adaptability, flexibility and responsiveness are three strong qualities a company needs to have for Effective Organising.

Any successful manager will tell you the importance of investing in your employees to get a good return. As such many enrol in management training courses to learn about motivational techniques and systems that will improve the size and quality of output from their staff.

One topic likely to be on the syllabus of a good management training course is employee empowerment. A lot of companies may say that it’s a philosophy they believe in, but few actually take clear steps to carry it out. It’s a concept that can differentiate companies that grow and succeed, from those that stagnate.

Here are some pointers you can use to implement employee empowerment:

- Give your employee as much information and communication as you can. Too much is better than too little
- Deal with your employees with the respect and trust that you expect to receive yourself
- Investigate their soft skills training requirements. Give them the opportunity to gain new skills and resources, which will enable them to reach your collective goals
- Be clear in the roles, responsibilities and expectations of performance that you expect of them
- Give them as much authority and freedom of choice as possible to get on with the job
- Allow them some personal influence on the type of job they do and they way they do it

So you have a fantastic idea for a new product or service that will take your company into a new phase of prosperity, or secure your financial future. As an entrepreneur, how do you put it all together? That’s the question we’ve been answering in our series of articles on establishing a new concept.

Some may take time out to undergo some business, marketing or management training courses, to give them the knowledge to transform their new idea or concept into a real opportunity for development.

To re-cap we’ve identified the following necessary steps:

- The product or service must be clearly defined
- The customer and the benefits to the customer must be clearly defined
- The need to identify the appropriate channels for distribution

The fourth and final step is – Putting it all together.

This is the moment were you collate, analyse, filter and condense all your information to have a crystal clear idea of your new product or service concept. Test yourself; if you’re pitching your idea to the most potentially influential person in the world, can you cover all the first three areas in the time it takes to travel an escalator together?

This is the third in a series of articles on the subject (see ‘Steps to a establishing a new concept – Parts 1 & 2’). We’ve already looked at the need to have the product or service must be clearly defined, and we’ve considered the importance that the customer and the benefits to the customer must be clearly defined.

Now let’s turn our attention to the following:

The need to identify the appropriate channels for distribution

The distribution channel is critical in developing your concept for a new product or service. This will have a huge effect on the probability of achieving your goals in short, medium and long term. There are typically two ways to distribute your new product or service:

Indirect Channel

This will be through a retailer or distributor, who will ultimately be responsible for unit sales to the end user. As such, the decision as to which retailer or distributor to use is an important one; inexperienced entrepreneurs will not be analytical or constructively critical enough in their choice, such is their keenness to ‘get the product out there’. Your profit margins will be adjusted so that the distributor or retailer can make earn their crust, but they may enable you to reach a far bigger market in terms of volume sales.

Direct Channel

You may choose provide and market a product service directly to your customers or the end user, typically via the internet, or a face to face approach. It will give you the potential for higher margins, but you will have to invest more time and energy in selling the new concept (e.g. sales training and resources), and may have a lower volume of sales compared to a large and effective distributor.