Improving your business
As your business grows, tap into a wider range of skills. Build your leadership and management expertise to cope with change and expansion
Running an established business and continuing its success is a big challenge. It demands skilled and motivated management and staff at all levels.
Your business could operate more efficiently and effectively by developing and improving the skills of your employees. Even small improvements in this area can help increase productivity and output.
To sustain success and keep your market position you also need a pipeline of new talent to strengthen your team. Our wide range of programmes make hiring and training new employees, particularly young people, easy and affordable. Allowing you to maintain and improve your team and sharpen your competitive edge.
Benefits of addressing skills:
- you'll reach your business objectives
- you'll feel confident when competing for new contracts
- you'll stay ahead of the competition
- you'll future-proof your business
- you'll strengthen your reputation
Support available
The training support and funding landscape is extensive and can be difficult to understand
To help we've summarised it for you
What things can you consider to help improve your business?
Continuously enhance the skills of your workforce according to ongoing or changing business needs by:
- Evaluating any training carried out to identify whether it’s had a positive impact on your people’s skills and behaviours.
- Including a process that advocates and supports opportunities for career development amongst your staff. Do you have specific programmes such as coaching or mentoring which can support and nurture the skills your business has?
- Having an appropriate performance appraisal and employee feedback process which identifies the strengths and expertise of your people and also helps them to improve in areas of further development.
Developing a system of succession planning and staff progression can be more cost effective to your business when compared to the outlay associated with replacing staff who might seek better prospects elsewhere. Work out how to identify the potential within your business. Develop your people and prepare them for new responsibilities which can be motivating and rewarding. Train them and treat them well, provide opportunities at the right time and they’re likely to remain with you. Retaining the talent in your business is important so that you maximise the potential and value of your people now and in the future.
Reviewing and improving your business practices can help to identify if any of your systems are becoming out dated, or if any processes are losing their efficiency. This can also be linked to the skills of your people. Do you check the quality of your business processes? Are you keeping up with what’s new in technology or communication mediums? Do your staff feel empowered to offer suggestions on the way things are done? Is there a culture of continuous improvement?
Look through some ways you can improve employee engagement:
Actively engage with your supply chain
Ensuring a strong working partnership with your suppliers can support improvements in your own organisation. Business’s relationships with supply chains can vary from close and collaborative to transactional to a needs only basis. However, if your supplier has a sound approach to skills training and development this can improve the quality of the service you will get from them. It’s useful to find out the approach your suppliers have for training their staff. You could find out before contracting with them, stating the importance of skills development. You may also be able to co-operate on training or share information about good practices you have. Making the partnership as effective as possible is good for you both.
Management
Further strengthening management skills and refining business acumen can help you to identify and address the future challenges your business will face. Some of these may include:
- attracting the right people to work for you
- ensuring a quality service at all times, and knowing how to get better at what you do
- ensuring your workforce has the ability and skills to meet the demands of a competitive future
Look through our programmes on Leadership to find out the support available.
Finding out your Skills Gap
The skills gap is a term often given to the comparison between the actual performance of your people against their true potential. This also has an impact on the desired performance levels of your business.
Carrying out a training needs or skills analysis helps you to identify your skills gap.
Try out our Skills Profile to start you on your way. It’s been designed to help you quickly identify skill areas you might need to address.
If you choose to, your profile can be analysed by one of our business advisers who will contact you to talk through your outcome report.