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Simply put, corporate training refers to the design and delivery of learning
to improve performance, skills, or knowledge of employees to enhance job
performance, or up-skill new employees before they are taken on-board.
Today, India has a very young, growing, and productive workforce, and this
advantage is being protected through strong investment and focus on building the
talent. With the gap between demand and supply growing in India and the
increasingly complex business needs, organizations now realize the need to
invest in corporate training.
Given the trends, one can say that corporate training is at its prime with
top IT firms spending millions of dollars on employee training and development.
Organizations are now moving toward innovative learning mediums like e-learning
and m-learning to bridge the talent gap. In addition, organizations are
collaborating with academia, and developing finishing schools to build talent.
In this age of outsourcing, where companies across the globe are focusing on
keeping the core functions in-house and outsourcing the rest to domain experts,
organizations see benefits in outsourcing important functions like training and
development to companies, as it is critical to their business.
Training has emerged as a specialized area. Building structured,
standardized, scalable, and rigorous learning mechanisms requires full-time
attention. Organizations prefer to outsource the same, given the availability of
specialized service providers, who have extensive knowledge about a functional
area of work.
Experts believe that while individual training was until now the predominant
driving force of the training market, corporate training, too, is gradually
picking up with enterprises outsourcing their training needs. The reasons are
not too far to seek.
The reason why most IT companies prefer outsourcing rather than having an
in-house training department is because of scale and speed. This implies that
most training vendors today are able to provide the requisite scale to their
clients when it comes to providing consistent and high-quality training to
thousands of people across several locations and because training vendors are
able to source the services of outside content experts.
Almost all IT companies outsource their training induction program simply
because induction training programs are on a large scale, and the company might
not want to divert its resources in induction training. Moreover, with
outsourced training vendors, there is no organizational baggage since the
partner becomes a sounding board for all training-related decisions.
Courses in Demand
Technology-oriented courses like Java and C++ continue to be in demand even
today. Training is generally of two types: the first is base-level training,
which includes training in .NET, Oracle, and Microsoft Technologies. The second
type is related to industry-specific, structured training like in software
engineering, quality management, project management, and process management. One
also sees a lot of specialized training in business intelligence, storage and
operating system.
As per the Training magazines 2007 industry report, globally, the highest
demand for training is in the financial services sector, at 18%, followed by
manufacturing at 16% and educational institutions at 15%.
With India becoming a major offshore player and outsourcing hub, the trend is
quite different. A major chunk of the corporate training market share goes to
the IT/ITeS sector. Other sectors where demand is growing are PSU, financial
services, and manufacturing.
Need for Corporate Training
The need of the hour is to make organizations understand that learning of
any type should be a continuous process and organizations need to help employees
at all levels, from the executive to the senior management level. The training
should aid them in identifying their learning paths and support them to achieve
it by providing enhancement avenues and encouraging them to acquire skills to
get to their desired role.
The benefit of this initiative is two-pronged: employees feel empowered and
have more clarity on where they are headed; and they help in reducing noise and
issues related to job stagnation, role enhancement, etc.
To supplement the learning paths and assess the skills acquired, companies
need to instigate the need for certification. Learning paths act as a
step-by-step guide providing competency assessment at each step, skill
acquisition for the next step and certification milestones at designated
intervals.
Choosing a Training Partner
For any organization looking to outsource its training, the golden rule
before joining hands with any training partner is to first chalk out
organizational goals and objectives. Enterprises need to first get clarity on
their business visionwhether they are looking at training in order to prepare
its employees for handling scaling and expansion, or the training aims at
equipping employees with skills to defend its market share.
The next important consideration is the background of the training partner.
Other considerations include finding out whether the training partner has enough
local resources to pitch in during training programs, and whether the training
company has enough assetstechnology, infrastructure, trainers, and relevant
content.
Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in
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