Abx Company the Exorbitant Cost

¶ … ABX Company

The exorbitant cost of losing employees and having to retrain new ones has made the cost-efficiency of the training process of paramount importance. In 2008, 250 human resources professional were surveyed across different industries of varying sizes and locations. In terms of workforce skill readiness, 94% of respondents indicated that their organization's employees were not adequately prepared or possessed the necessary skills to meet company goals ("Most HR," 2008, para. 1). Thus, it is abundantly clear that training is a necessity -- not a luxury.

Some training is based on improving current processes, while some is geared toward implementing entirely new concepts or technologies. Therefore, as a training consultant for the ABX Company, Pat will first need to determine two important things 1) what areas the employees need improvement in, and 2) what new systems or technologies they need to learn.

The best way to determine where the employee needs lie is simply to ask them. Surveys and interviews can provide a wealth of information that will help to take the guess work out of determining needs. Of course as Beebe, Mottet & Roach (2004) make clear "In addition to analyzing the needs of individuals, it's also important to consider the needs of the organization. To analyze the needs of an organization, consider what the organization needs in order to achieve its mission. Does it need skilled workers? Or does it need competent leaders and managers? After considering the needs of the organization, you'll then need to determine how training can help address those needs" (pp. 16-17).

Pat will also need to determine how much of the corporate budget is allotted for training to make sure that her plan does not exceed the company's resources. In addition, she will have to make sure that her determinations from the needs assessment are in line with what the company executives want. If they are not, she will either need to convince them of what they need, or adjust her strategy to fit what they think they need. The former is preferable to the latter because Pat is the one who has performed the needs analysis and knows where the training dollars should be invested. However if the company has certain ideas set in stone, and is not willing to venture down a different path, Pat will have no choice but to adjust her thinking and design a training program that will meet the employer's demands, which unfortunately, may overlook some of the needs of the employees.

Prior to designing and implementing the training program it is important for the Pat to make sure that all interested parties have the same understanding of the goals to be achieved through the training; that is, what the goal means and what is needed to assess if the goal has been met through the targeted training. The best way that Pat can make sure that the needs analysis will result in the type of training program that she deems to be the most valuable is to be as detailed as possible in collecting her data. The more tangible information Pat has, the more support she will have if she has to convince the employer that, for example, instead of investing in sales communication training (which the employees seem to be well versed in already), a more profitable investment would be training them on new software programs that help them to organize their sales data or more accurately target their markets. As Brown (2002) points out, "trainers should view themselves the same way that management does, making a direct contribution to the bottom line" (p. 569). Numbers do not lie and if Pat can show the employer that the program she has developed based on the needs assessment will either save or make the company the most money, she should have little trouble getting management on board.

A cost-benefit analysis can also help Pat to convince management that her training recommendations are going to benefit the company's bottom line. This can be a challenging task, however, considering that certain factors associated with training, such as improved job performance, can be difficult to quantify.

According to Judge et al. (2001) contributing factor to the lack of research on the cost-efficiency of distance education as a training tool may lie in the multiple ways that job performance is measured across different industries. The construct of job performance is complex and involves more than just the implementation of a pre-defined set of responsibilities and projected outcomes. This makes it difficult to determine the extent to which, for example, investments in online training provide a higher ROI than face-to-face training. It is necessary to use job performance as a major parameter in measuring ROI, and thus it is critical to define the qualities that are correlated with performance ratings.

Christen, Iyer, and Soberman (2006) provide a broad definition of job performance as an aggregate construct of effort, skill, and outcomes that are important to the employee, and outcomes that are important to the firm. The challenge for Pat will be that when seeking to compare ROI between departments is that each department is likely to have a distinctive set of priorities. However, Pat may benefit by examining previous research on companies similar to ABX as a guide to developing a set of criteria for job performance. In doing so, she will be able to use performance as a significant measurement parameter in determining the effects of the training program on the bottom line.

Once Pat has completed her needs assessment and cost-benefit analysis, she will need to start devising the content of her training program. This will begin by developing a set of training objectives based on her findings. For example, let us say that Pat conducted a survey among the employees in the marketing and promotion department of ABX, asking them what aspects of their job performance they feel most confident in and which ones they feel the least confident in. if, for example, 75% of the employees felt the least confident in using e-mail marketing software, then obviously a workshop in how to use that software would be appropriate. However, Pat can take this a step further by not only conducting training on e-mail marketing software, but also on other types of marketing software that the employees at ABX have never used. This way, both types of training are being implemented: enhancement of a previous skill, and implementation of a new skill.

As Beebe, Mottet & Roach (2004) point out when describing the "process approach" to consultation, sometimes companies do not even know they have a need for something until they are actually confronted with it. Therefore, it is the consultant's responsibility "to determine the overall vitality of the organization and then recommends strategies for improving organizational effectiveness" (Beebe et. al., 2004, p. 10).

Taking all of this into consideration, Pat's list of objectives would likely look something like this: