In conducting employer brand research for clients, one of the things we often discover is that people want more training, more opportunities to learn. As useful as they can be, we’re not talking video explainers of how to use Excel. People are hungry to develop their craft so that they can reach their potential, make their job easier and increase their earning potential.
It’s about the give and the get – give something to your people and you will get back so much more in return from committed, loyal and better equipped teams.
The investment needed for role-based skills training can be significant, particularly for organisations employing thousands of people across a diverse range of roles and skills.
But if organisations don’t train their people effectively enough, there will always be a productivity gap. That’s the approach we’ve taken at Creed recently as we’ve looked at the way we do things – are we giving all the tools to everyone that joins us to understand what we do and how we do it as effectively as possible?
Learning by osmosis and observation in an office was never the best way, but some people managed it. That’s how I learned. But it’s not particularly smart, inclusive or practical, particularly in these days of hybrid working.
So we’re doing lots of work on training as a team. Broad skills and in particular on our core products and services. Recruitment marketing and employer branding are fairly niche areas of the economy needing quite a few different skills. To work in the client service team here, you generally need to get recruitment and how data is so pivotal to it, as well as be good at marketing – briefing, scoping, critiquing creative, to match client problems to solutions.
It’s quite an undertaking around busy diaries and client commitments. But while it’s not as urgent as client work, it’s still really important for knowledge sharing and building relationships. Think about your mentors. You don’t remember them because they were good at presenting, or because they could tell stories from data – you remember them because that’s when you started to learn how to do it.
Jonny Heyhoe
Senior Client Solutions Partner
