Member Article

Innovation can boost North East skills

By Sara O’Brien, commercial director at KF Training

Upskilling the adult workforce remains a key challenge facing businesses across many sectors of the North East economy. With some sectors – especially manufacturing and engineering – grappling with major skills shortages, retraining the existing workforce is key to ensuring that businesses become more competitive in the short term.

Much has been said about the need to bring new blood into the industry and while this is important, it will be some time before businesses reap the benefits of hiring apprentices. It may take a few years for these youngsters to learn new skills and get up to speed in their chosen profession.

Companies, however, cannot afford to wait a few years. They require new and higher level skills within their business today, which is why they need to take an innovative approach to developing their workforce.

The training must address specific business challenges and meet well-defined business goals. It should be well structured to allow staff to meet pre-agreed objectives but sufficiently flexible to take into account companies’ changing business needs. Some companies spend extortionate amounts of money on off-the-shelf training packages that don’t meet their needs. Not surprisingly, this leads to wasted resource and poor results.

The type of training required will vary from business to business. Some staff require specific technical skills, others need training which keeps them abreast of the latest changes in legislation. Some companies put senior employees through leadership and management programmes to make them better equipped to improve staff performance, while others consider mentoring as a good way of bringing new skills and insights into the business.

Calling on the services of a qualified mentor can boost the skills base of a company within a relatively short timeframe. The mentor’s role is to give mentees the tools and techniques to find solutions to potential problems that might arise in everyday working life. This type of training has enabled many MDs and CEOs to step away from the business, gain a fresh perspective and introduce new initiatives that have made their business more profitable or efficient. Innovation is at the heart of effective learning.

At KF Training we’ve developed our own innovation programmes that help companies and their staff think outside the box, look for alternative ways of approaching tasks and question commonly held assumptions about the business. Increasingly, companies are considering such programmes as they recognise the importance of upskilling their workforces, diversifying their business and finding effective solutions to the challenges within their business.

KF Training oversees the delivery of 100-150 new candidates each month – more than treble the figure from just over a year ago. While that’s testament to the efficiencies we’ve introduced in our business, it also reflects the appetite of companies to build skills within theirs.

That encouraging trend must continue if North East companies are to remain competitive, create jobs and generate wealth for the local economy.

For further information about KF Training visit http://www.kftraining.co.uk/, call 0191 518 6830 or e-mail info@kftraining.co.uk.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by KF Training Ltd .