Training and development strategy for Tech Networks of Boston

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Key elements of training and development geared toward improving the performance

The three important Elements in training and development include:

Strategic Analysis

This factor will help the employees understand the strategic position of Tech Networks. It is critical to diagnose environmental changes and establish their influence on the company and employees. In training, strategic analysis establishes a view of the key variables that could affect the future and present performance of the company (Armstrong, 2007). When strategic analysis is conducted perfectly, it helps the company choose the best strategy for growth in the market. It will be beneficial to understand some key elements under strategic analysis.

The environment: Tech Networks would not exist without the ability to interact with a complex commercial, economic, technological, political, social, and cultural environment. Tech Networks of Boston is faced with changing environments. A precise understanding of the impacts is important in the creation of the strategic plan (Armstrong, 2007). These externalities are commonly referred to as weaknesses and threats forming part of the SWOT analysis.

The company's resources: The resources of Tech Networks of Boston are internal influences. These are strategic capabilities viewed as the weaknesses and strengths of the company. They also form part of the SWOT analysis.

Stakeholder expectations: The development of Tech Networks of Boston is reliant on the expectations of the company's stakeholders. Their assumptions and beliefs constitute the culture of Tech Networks of Boston. For instance, the thoughts of different managers in various departments may shape the company's strategy. Therefore, some influences arise from the stakeholders; the rate of impacts on the company's strategy is dependent on the respective power of the stakeholders' group (Merson, 2011). If the stakeholder group has a great power, it translates into a strong influence on the strategic analysis (Harrison, 2009). A keen reflection of Tech Network's business resources, environment, objectives, and expectations within the political and cultural context of the company ought to be the starting point of understanding the strategic analysis.

Strategic choice

This is the second most important factor after strategic analysis. Here, the company will be ready to make strategic decisions. Strategic decisions refer to selecting the best possible courses of action based on the strategic options evaluation.

Strategy implementation

The final factor is the implementation strategy. This refers to the way in which Tech Networks will translate their strategy into actions and activities. Implementation strategy demands proper deployment of the firm's resources and careful planning. It further requires keen handling of potential changes in the company's structure and effective change management. The strategy could be implemented based on phases (Merson, 2011).

Potential challenges that the managers of the business could face

As businesses continue to diversify, chances for workplace challenges intensify. Small business managers and owners confront a set of possible challenges including technological advancements, organization, and team or employee issues. Mostly, the underlying sources of these challenges are the lack of flowing and open communications or the use of inadequate organizational structure. Businesses are compounding problems through avoiding communicating a clear chain of command (Armstrong, 2007).

Employee issues: Problems of individual employees could be supervisor issues, personality conflicts, company structure, or personal trauma oriented. The leaders ought to study the causes of the problems and the people or factors fueling the fire. In case of an absence of a clear trigger, the cause may fall back on confusing or insufficient communications. For instance, an employee at Tech Networks may feel answerable to multiple supervisors if the command chain is poorly communicated (Harrison, 2009).

Team problems: For teams to be high performing, they should be committed to working towards a common goal. If they experience individual disconnect with members of other teams, the team risks becoming non-functional. Such issues are rooted on management or organizational communication breakdowns confusing personal or team common goals. Leaders of these teams should foster cohesiveness and provide constant feedback (Armstrong, 2007). When Tech Networks faces team issues, managers will be required to assess the problem and act promptly to correct the problem and avoid further serious breakdowns in performance.

Organization-wide Problems: Minor team or employee issues may rapidly expand to the entire company if the managers do not embrace prompt corrective measures. This situation ought to be avoided at all costs because it leads to employees forming groups with odds at each other. Incase all the actions geared towards avoidance fail, managers must be equipped and prepared to embrace the most dramatic corrective actions. They must deter these issues from adversely changing the organization's corporate culture, which has been keenly cultivated to make Tech Networks and its workplace a high performing organization (Armstrong, 2007).

Technology Changes: Just as advances in the auto industry have seen the emergence of new car savvy autos replacing the traditional cars, technological advances are expected to shape all business sectors. These advances have spurred a rise in demand for highly skilled labor, in support of high productivity growth and the nature of organization of businesses. Rapid transfer of mobile populations, technologies, and knowledge is a result of rapid, inexpensive information transmission and communications made possible by the revolution in information technology. Technological advances are expected to create job opportunities in all business industries (Harrison, 2009). These advances are likely to create cross-disciplinary skill pre-requisites, which may challenge job designs. The rapid rate of technological advancements could tax slow organizations procedures for re-skilling the workforce, flexibilities in shifting employees to short-term tasks and rapid resource procurement. All these aim at leveraging new collaborations and new technologies.

Various roads are likely to lead to organizational problems at Tech Networks. Successful solutions to these problems follow a similar plan. For instance, a set of employees could have conflicting interpersonal issues. If the manager is not part of the problem, he/she must become part of the solution (Evans, 2012). These issues must be addressed and corrected to avoid recurrence of the problems. While this is may appear simple when stated, it has demonstrated to be extremely challenging to accomplish. However, it is imperative for Tech Networks to embrace these steps in a move to maintain a high-performing workforce.

A competitive training strategy

Competing based on knowledge will be integral for the future success of Tech Networks of Boston. The agenda for most activities that the company engages in will happen at the work teams and individual levels. However, the effectiveness of Tech Networks of Boston requires enhancing organizational capabilities to leverage and exploit knowledge. The rationale behind this organizational training strategy is the fact that Tech Networks of Boston could develop a peculiar organizational and human capital that will be hard to imitate but continuously evolving. Evidently, abilities, skills, and knowledge of employees are intertwined with the company's culture in generating unique resources that other industry players cannot apply or acquire. It is hard to imitate human capital as it is created via evolutionary procedures, which are part of a unique company culture (Armstrong, 2007).

Conversations relating to knowledge across different levels are essential when social capital is the addressed. The conversations may occur between organizations, between employees and vice versa. Social capital is characterized as an asset embedded in the associations of committees, individuals, societies, or networks. The procedure by which knowledge is obtained and shared is unique within the company. This will make it impossible for others to copy. Organizational capital emerges from converting collective knowledge and individual knowledge acquired through the process of learning into systems, routines and processes (Evans, 2012). These are aimed at developing Tech Network's reputation, capabilities, and competence, which are rare and challenging to imitate. Human capital tends to have a symbiotic association with organizational capital in that each provides the requirements for the development and use of one another. Collective skills, individual skills and knowledge and applied to enhance databases and work methods. In turn, groups apply these as sources of knowledge and individuals in future work tasks.

For Tech Networks to be successful in the industry, it is imperative to offer employees great training on customer services. This must cover training on how solid customer services could help the company gain a great return on investment. In this case, such trainings will be an asset for the company's return on investment, as it would help minimize costs due to lower employee turnover rates. By treating customers well, employees will not be fired. As a result, the company will not need to spend a lot of money on hiring and training new workers (Armstrong, 2007). Consequently, Tech Networks will have an attractive return on investment it made on employee training in different areas. Therefore, human capital is the most critical and important for Tech Network's competitive advantage. This is because it is the most challenging, and almost impossible to imitate.