IT training is good for business
Reading Time: 2 minutes6th December 2016 | Modified: 19th December 2022Categories: CNC News
Many companies simply don’t invest enough time and budget in IT training for their employees. The result is lower productivity and higher running costs.
In some cases, failure to train staff can be catastrophic. Take the recent case of an NHS employee who copied 840,000 fellow workers into an email reply causing the entire email system to fail.
Such ignorance about how to use IT tools can be easily avoided with regular training. Organisations of all sizes should set aside time to train their staff whenever any significant change occurs such as in the introduction of new hardware or the adoption of new applications.
Gary Jowett from Computer & Network Consultants in Brighton says: “All too often, IT training is the first thing to be cut by companies seeking to make savings. However, it’s a false economy because it slows down productivity, leaving people to work out new systems and applications for themselves. They inevitably make more calls to their IT provider’s helpdesk which pushes up the cost of the IT support their company receives.”
Big return on investment
A recent report by IBM estimates that there’s a significant return on investment from employee training. Project teams who received 40 hours of training per member met their “significant” project objectives three times as often as teams that received 30 hours or less. Training also increases customer satisfaction by 16 per cent and there is a 22 per cent faster roll-out of products and processes.
The full impact of Brexit remains unknown but it’s likely that there will be less people with IT skills coming to the UK from Europe, so the need to train existing employees is more pressing than ever.
Gary says: “Regular IT training doesn’t need to cost a lot but it reaps a positive return in many different ways. It helps employees to expand their skills by doing a greater variety of tasks and reduces reliance on temporary contractors. Overall, it makes employees more flexible and versatile so that they can serve their customers more effectively.”
