Educating Your People - The Key to Success

Date: 30/04/2010

As we plunged into recession an easy target for cost cuts was the training budget. It can be argued that the opposite was in fact appropriate, and that the education of the workforce will play a critical role in the success of businesses as we ease out of recession.

Why is this so? Learning develops new skills, knowledge and, vitally, an improved attitude. The Invoice Finance and ABL industry finds itself in a newly evolved competitive environment. This is the result of players exiting the market and a series of mergers and acquisitions during the last 2 years. To deal with this, businesses will be thinking about how best to differentiate themselves in such areas as technology, products and customer service.

The question to be asking yourselves is, do your people have the skills to meet the needs of this new competitive environment, and if not how do you fill the skills gaps?

Recruiting new employees can be a somewhat risky option – will they fit in? Will they like you and want to stay? How long will their learning curve be for assimilation of your systems, processes and procedures? Recruitment also carries high costs in the form of advertising, agency fees and management time in ploughing through CV’s and interviews.

A viable alternative is to train your own people to fill the ‘known quantity’ skill gaps: updating existing and rarely used skills and learning new ones to enable continuous improvement. The benefits of educating and training employees are proven and well documented. Some of these are:

• Increased motivation, productivity and commitment
• Reduced absenteeism
• Improved employees’ loyalty and attitude towards their work and employer
• Keeping a business up-to-date with industry trends and technology
• Increased competitiveness and efficiency
• Improved customer service

Of course there’s a cost, but there is a pay-back with dividends in the benefits. People are your most valuable asset (yes, even more valuable than the trade debts!) but conversely untrained people with a poor attitude can be a huge liability!

At De Vere & Co we are bringing fresh and relevant education to the Invoice Finance and ABL industry. If you prefer it we can bring our training modules to your site: not only saving you travel and hotel costs, but allowing us to offer a day rate for agreed group sizes that gives you the benefit of economies of scale.

Our approach is to develop relationships with our clients and to work together with you to tailor our offerings to the particular needs of your businesses and the skill gaps of your employees. We also cater for those businesses wishing to train smaller numbers of employees in a particular module by offering regional open sessions. The next session will be our 1 Day module:Sage Manipulation Training, which will be held in Gatwick/Crawley June 17th 2010. See details on the website under Education & Training, 'Upcoming Training Events' and make a booking now.