The first thing that comes to our minds when we are talking about the importance of education and training is that it fosters knowledge, skills and attitudes that enhance the value of professionals at workplace. Trained employees add value.
In a knowledge economy acquiring knowledge is supreme. In a corporate world where constant transformation is the common standard, workers need to dive into a constant flow of learning in order to respond to the never ending demand of new technologies and tools. Only competent people can live up to the challenges they are faced with in their everyday work life. When corporations assume that training is the key to success, they invest in their work force. If companies want experts, they need to offer training.
On the other hand, technical expertise must be accompanied by social skills that enable people to work in teams, communicate effectively and collaborate beyond boundaries of their own department. In flat organizational structures professionals need more complex social skills, a proactive can-do-attitude and a growth mindset. A broader point of view beyond silos and a clear big picture is something that is also conveyed in workshops where teams of different functional areas are brought together, improving their networking, sharing information and ideas.
Following that line of thought, training and education provide moments when people come and learn together, relate to each other, connect and foster bonds that are beneficial for teamwork, collaboration, and job satisfaction. Getting to know the face and the name of the voice at the other end of the line, boosts empathy, mutual help and coordination.
So, training doesn’t only enables critical competence but also promotes healthy corporate citizenship and corporate culture, another critical success factor in nowadays work life.
From a personal point of view, education and training do a lot more than that. Competent employees feel more confident in their skills, fulfilled, and satisfied and this again fosters talent retention. Talent is not only identified, recruited, and retained but talent also needs to be developed and motivated. Training in that sense is not only a basic condition for personal progress but also crucial for strategic people management.
In fact, depending on the training processes, competent and motivated employees are more versatile and polyvalent in their workplaces which allows companies to manage people in a more flexible ways and respond to changes in a more effective manner.
Beyond obvious corporate advantages there are more social and individual benefits of education and training. Access to training has also a very important social role for equality and inclusion. Diversity policies are not only implemented by management decisions, but they are thoroughly deployed by training. In that sense, social justice is
put into practice by offering job opportunities but in the first place it implies offering educational opportunities. Education and training are progress.
Yet, despite all these obvious benefits, still many companies are reluctant to do more training because at the end it seems to be costly in terms of money and effort. Let me finish with a famous and well-known quote commonly attributed to former president of Harvard University, Derek Bok. Some research on the internet quickly reveals that this quote was published earlier on in the Washington Post in an Ann Landers column by Eppie Lederes: “If you think that training is expensive, try ignorance”.