LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT remains among the top HR issues facing most organisations, and some have taken extra steps to ensure their training budget is money well spent
LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT remains among the top HR issues facing most organisations, and some have taken extra steps to ensure their training budget is money well spent.
For BMW Australia, training is an intensive and essential part of the business. “If we didn’t train our people, particularly our technical people, we wouldn’t be able to keep the cars on the road because they are quite complex,” said James Harper, professional development manager for BMW Australia. “It would be too hard for them to learn all by themselves as well as do their work.”
His training budget has increased over the last 12 months, with particular attention paid to the sales function. “Sales has always been a key business driver but we have been putting more effort into it recently,” Harper said.
“That is because there is more competition in the market. Australia used to have just BMW and Mercedes sitting at the top [of the luxury car market] but there’s quite a bit more competition now. Therefore the actual selling skills and the ability to develop rapport and relationships with customers is more critical.”
BMW Australia’s experience reflects the most recent research by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) which shows that employers are spending more on training their employees than ever before.
In Employer Training Expenditure and Practices, Australia, employers reported a total of $3,653 million in net direct expenditure on structured training during the 2001-02 financial year. This was a 53 per cent increase compared with the last report in 1996.
Yet much training isn’t as effective as it could because it doesn’t factor in two distinct parts of the learning and development process. Without addressing both, results can be limited, according to Emma Weber, director of specialist learning company Vivat.
“First of all, there are the skills and knowledge and secondly, there is the behavioural change. Most of the money and time is being invested in the skills and knowledge and the behavioural change is being left to the managers in the workplace. That is because behavioural change is really difficult to get in a two or three day course,” she said.
For the 81 per cent of all Australian employers who provide some training for their employees, she said this is a major challenge.
