Margie Stone of Excelebrate recently attended the APSO (Association of Personnel Service Organisations) annual conference at Birchwoods in Boksburg.  A valuable and interesting connection was made with Emmy Di Rito from Prodigy Business Services who offered a publication called Skills Matters – a reference guide for skills development in South Africa.  The Foreword is written by Nerishni Shunmugan, Director of Prodigy Business Services.  The objective of Prodigy is to obtain, summarise and interpret training data to assist professionals across the public and private sectors with an understanding of what has been achieved through training, and where training needs to be directed.

Prodigy’s research discusses certain practices that hinder strategic planning in training and development.  To mention a few: Company’s compliance with SETA requirements only to recoup their 50% of the skills levy rather than to achieve focus and real skills development; use of training providers who have limited skills or understanding of the industry; focus on payroll and administration rather than on human resource planning and management; poor match between management needs and outcomes based training; training data geared towards compliance of SETA, BEE, Employment Equity Reports etc, rather than on people development.

In summarizing where emphasis must go for future focus on training, Prodigy makes the following points:  Companies need to invest significant resources in training and to focus on executive development programs;   the Executive Team needs to be committed to training so that this culture can filter through the organization; the organization needs to inject effective continuous training related to Customer Service;  the Skills strategy needs to be aligned with the business objectives and training programs must support business and employee goals; and finally, the effectiveness of the training must be measured.

For those of you whose passion is training, as ours at Excelebrate’s is, you can obtain a copy of Skills Matters from Prodigy Business Services at info.skillsmatters.com.  Their website is www.skillsmatters.com.  This makes for a very good read and gives direction and data on training in South Africa at present.

We have been astounded at the amount of money invested in training in different organizations where HR Executives have difficulty in identifying or proving specific measurable outcomes. Excelebrate remains committed to guaranteeing results.  This claim has led to much discussion and challenge as to the viability of being able to guarantee anything where the human element is involved.  We believe, that given reasonable access to the staff concerned, and being supported by the Management, specific objectives can be set and measured.  The single biggest problem in all training is the lack of follow up.  When the Excelebrate process is allowed to run its course, the training achieves phenomenal results and effectively pays for itself.