Up-skilling staff: a learning curve for our businesses?

Written by Michael Walmsley  |  04-04-17

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We all already know how important making sure our staff have the right skills to do the job is, but with ever-changing roles how often does up-skilling staff come down to a question of timing and cost?

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Many small businesses struggle with this dilemma – and we’re no different when it comes to it – but we’ve taken an interesting approach to address this issue. As a business we’ve got to make sure our team gives their ‘A-game’, so by building an open work culture in which knowledge is shared across staff, we seem to have found an answer to the problem. This approach isn’t for just ‘Creatives’ though, we believe it can benefit businesses in all sectors.

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The reasons we believe in up-skilling staff is because we’ve found that when this is brought into an open and pro-active work culture, skills and knowledge are freely shared between employees – which benefits both staff and the business itself in turn. What we’re saying is that we found individuals in our studio were essentially up-skilling other staff without ever being asked to. Now, I’m not saying that you should expecting staff to teach three nights a week, but what they’ve learnt can be shared across your business. This can take away the headache of costly training courses and down-time in the business, but only if done in the correct environment.

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For us, a mixture of online training courses, open culture of sharing knowledge and guidance with examples of best practice has meant we’ve up-skilled and reinvigorated our studio many times over. It’s helped us to understand the skills we have in-house, and to map out what we can learn VS what we might need to find externally.

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Both professionally and personally I can tell you that it’s had a positive effect on everyone in the company – including myself.

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There are a lot of  really great articles like this one, written in The Telegraph by John Graff, UK country manager and Vice President EMEA at LinkedIn – well worth a read if you’ve got a minute.

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Mark Murray
Managing Director



Contact

TPW Design Consultants, 
Suite 305 India Mill Centre, 
Bolton Road, Darwen BB3 1AE.

01254 777111
hello@t-pw.com

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