Are your people trained to do their jobs?
Recently I went to a friend’s house to help her with a problem she was having with her internet connection .She is a bank official pretty high up in the company and working for the bank for 20 years. I checked out the problem which was non-existent, helped her to install her antivirus software and then she started to ask me a few questions. At first I thought she was joking as she asked me how to create a new folder and what the difference was between save and save as. The truth of the situation was she was not joking she genuinely didn’t know these basic features of computer usage! How can this be possible? How can someone be doing their job in a bank without these basic skills? Has she hidden her computer illiteracy or do her superiors know about it?
Then of course it got me to thinking, how many workers do their job daily without having the skills to do it effectively. How much is this costing organisations in loss of productivity? My guess is that this could be enormous. Lack of training can see work being done too slowly, work being duplicated and people going about things in the wrong way because they are unaware of the shortcuts or the more efficient ways of doing things.
An Untrained workplace is something we can no longer afford, especially in today’s marketplace and training must become a priority if an organisation is continue to be productive and maintain competitiveness in the current economic climate.