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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