< Previous East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk ONLINE TRAINING T he skills shortage is being hailed as the biggest threat of 2022. In a post-pandemic world, we’ve come out into an economy where job openings are common and skilled applicants are less available than ever before. Combine this with the Great Resignation, which has seen many people move on due to pressures from Covid or just better offers elsewhere, and you have a scenario where many companies in our region and beyond are struggling to find qualified and skilled staff for key positions. Worse still, retaining staff becomes increasingly difficult when their value increases. After all, if a company is struggling to fill a position, then they may turn to headhunting to poach staff directly or increase their wage offerings and put themselves in greater competition against your company if you cannot do the same. There’s no magic solution to that and no real way to force an employee to stay if they want to move on, which means many businesses will have to deal with – or currently are dealing with – the challenge of finding skilled employees to hire for certain positions. If your business has the resources necessary to offer the greatest packages and attract the best talent, great, but those who cannot afford to break the bank to hire the best, may need to create the perfect candidate instead. Online training saw a massive boom during the lockdown period for the obvious reasons of its convenience and viability in a working-from-home landscape. While this was a great way to upskill staff during a time when productivity and work hours were low, every business owner understands what it can achieve. Training can help improve staff and give business leaders valuable skills they need to run a company. This is all applicable and very easily understood, but what many are missing out on is the potential online training has to solve the The skills shortage Every business understands the value of training in upskilling employees, but how many use training to strengthen their recruitment or open new branches of candidates? With the great resignation and the skills shortages gripping the East Midlands, this number might rise. 32 Á 30-33.qxp_Layout 1 04/05/2022 10:02 Page 1www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link ONLINE TRAINING © stock.adobe.com/Elnur 30-33.qxp_Layout 1 04/05/2022 10:02 Page 2 East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk ONLINE TRAINING recruitment crisis gripping the region by replacing, or supporting, in-house training already undertaken, by online courses tailored to the particular job. Businesses already run in-house training as an everyday part of hiring a new employee – but this, often day or several days long training wherein fire drills, company practice and more are explained, could easily be expanded into an outsourced, online training program designed to teach valuable skills the job requires. This could take part prior to a candidate starting with the company, or as part of their introductory term with the company and could be tailored theoretically to any position or role, used either to strengthen key skills, teach valuable qualifications or even shore up weaknesses in a candidate. This may not be an ideal solution of course, the ideal would be that a candidate comes with every skill necessary to fill the role, but in today’s business world where this simply isn’t happening, and where companies are fighting tooth and nail for a limited pool of skilled candidates, alternatives must be found. It may soon not be enough to simply wait for the right candidate, especially not when perspective employees now understand their scarcity, and are much more likely to make demands or hold out for the best job offers rather than settling for the first one made available. Aside from teaching a candidate the skills they need for a position, investing in upskilling employees can also work to increase their loyalty and reduce staff turnover. No employee will want to stay in the same position and role indefinitely, hence why many move on to further their careers, but by opening opportunities to grow skills and progress within the company, staff may see more career opportunities within the company than without. Of course, this isn’t always possible and there may not be much room for vertical progression, in which case it can feel like making employees © stock.adobe.com/Sikov 30-33.qxp_Layout 1 04/05/2022 10:02 Page 3www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link ONLINE TRAINING more qualified will only increase the chances that they move on. However, employees that are thinking of doing so will do so regardless of their skill set or not. It is better to have a highly skilled and motivated workforce than one that is struggling to cope. One of the reasons why training courses are so often cut by companies is because the results of them can seem intangible. Like so many other departments or initiatives, the budgets of these are cut first compared to profit- making venture. This is obviously a flawed way of thinking that will have to change in the long run, but perhaps the flaw is also in the idea that performance is difficult to quantify. It should not be. Targets and KPI’s have existed as far back as businesses have, and employees being trained to perform better should be able to show a measurable and quantifiable increase in productivity. If training is necessary to enable an employee to work in a role at all then it should already be easily quantified – the training has allowed the employee to take the position and has therefore worked – but if the training course is to upskill in areas such as sales, conflict resolution or health and safety, then managers must find other ways of measuring how successful it has been, but they must work to quantify this rather than simply write it off as too difficult, as has all too often been the excuse in the past. The simple fact is that skilled employees are not growing on trees anymore, but online training is more readily available, accessible and affordable than it has ever been before, in this digitally connected age. Those companies who are not growing with the times are missing the obvious solution and will be left fighting with other fish in an ever-shrinking pond of skilled candidates. Rather than trying to become the biggest fish in a small pond, it might be time to start enlarging the pond itself. 30-33.qxp_Layout 1 04/05/2022 10:02 Page 4 East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk NEBOSH Tell us a little about NEBOSH NEBOSH is a charity who have been developing relevant, recognised and respected health, safety, risk, wellbeing and environmental qualifications for over 40 years. So far, almost half a million people from around the world have achieved a NEBOSH qualification, and use the knowledge and skills gained to keep colleagues safe and well in their workplace. We have worked with Great Britain’s Regulator, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) to develop safety qualifications covering a range of topics including manual handling, incident investigation and risk assessment. We have also developed a bespoke qualification for their Health and Safety Inspectors, a service we provide to other customers including BP. Last month we launched a new service – NEBOSH Endorsed - which will harness our teams’ expertise in a new and different way. Through NEBOSH Endorsed, NEBOSH aims to help organisations elevate their in-company offering and deliver measurable behavioural change that contributes to healthier and safer workplaces. Why is it so important to invest in health and safety training and what opportunities does it provide? Ensuring that health and safety is properly managed is extremely important for organisations of any size, and in any sector. When considering health and safety training, employers should remember the following points: • It is a legal obligation to provide adequate training and inform your employees of risks and the corrective measures to keep people safe • It’s the right thing to do to protect people and your business • It makes good business sense as it, if designed correctly, can improve efficiency and reduce downtime. Investing in health and safety training and qualifications can help to minimise workplace injuries and illness, helping to maintain a healthy workforce, avoid prosecution, absence costs and loss of reputation. It also helps demonstrate your commitment to health and safety, which can help you win new business, motivate and retain staff, and attract investment. Many organisations choose to include NEBOSH qualifications on their competency matrices aligning job roles and career progression to employee’s personal development plans. Can you tell us more about your new service NEBOSH Endorsed, and the benefits that businesses might receive from it? The new NEBOSH Endorsed service is a way for organisations to demonstrate its in-company training has been developed and is delivered in a way that meets NEBOSH’s standards in terms of Q&A NEBOSH Recently, we spoke to Ian Cooke, Head of Corporate and Consumer Services at NEBOSH, about NEBOSH and its qualifications and its latest service, NEBOSH Endorsed. Ian Cooke, Head of Corporate and Consumer Services at NEBOSH 34-35.qxp_Layout 1 04/05/2022 10:03 Page 1www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link NEBOSH quality and learning impact. NEBOSH Endorsed offers two corporate solutions: • Bespoke consultation and development of in-company training • Assessment and endorsement of existing in-company learning Both solutions emphasise learning that delivers tangible impact to people and businesses which can lead to improved overall organisational performance. Every person that completes a NEBOSH Endorsed in-company training programme within their organisation will be recognised with a NEBOSH Endorsed certificate to mark their learning. Benefits of NEBOSH Endorsed: • Relevant to the individual to ensure that they carry out their job role successfully • Links to overarching organisational goals to improve organisational performance • Strengthens the organisations culture by aligning the training to the broader learning environment • Shows a return on investment • The use of technology to deliver effective learning in the flow of work anytime, anywhere • Learning that builds transferable skills for a more agile workforce • Learning impact demonstrates results, for example reduced incidents, improved compliance etc. • Reduces risk and may even lower insurance premiums! What makes NEBOSH Endorsed stand out from other in-house training? The key component of NEBOSH Endorsed is that the in-company training programmes must deliver learning impact and positively influence worker behaviour. According to CIPD, Learning and Skills at Work 2020 “only 16% assess the behaviour change of participants by assessing the transfer of learning into the workplace” following a training course. Learning impact is seen as complex and often fails to include the outcome within the initial design stage. This is where NEBOSH wants to close the gap with NEBOSH Endorsed as all training programs must deliver and measure learning impact to become NEBOSH Endorsed. NEBOSH will work with businesses to choose measurable targets that correlate and evidence the impact of the learning for both the business and the individual. Finding a learning impact measure is seen as complex and often fails to include the outcome within the initial design stage. The good news is, that you probably only need one or two measures, carefully chosen, to show a correlation between the learning and the added value. NEBOSH have a range of options to help with content creation and content delivery. As well as solutions that assess whether learning has taken place and measures its impact on both individual and organisational performance. To ensure that the in-company training delivers learning impact, NEBOSH will review the targets annually, or sooner if required. NEBOSH have partnered with suppliers that can offer digital solutions that can lead to better learner engagement, improve learner accessibility, improve content accessibility, and can be delivered in the flow of work. If you are interested in finding out more about NEBOSH and NEBOSH Endorsed, please visit the website – www.nebosh.org.uk/neboshendorsed 34-35.qxp_Layout 1 04/05/2022 10:03 Page 2B eing customer focused isn’t always a good thing. I’ll explain. Wearing your sales hat and providing what you may class as top-notch customer service can and often will go against what you are setting out to achieve in the first place - from the perspective of the customer. Yes as a consumer we expect professionalism, honesty, a delivery on promises etc etc. That is standard for what we as business owners would like to think we provide consistently through our products and services, but as a customer, we also crave personability, personality and a bespoke service that makes us feel…well, exclusive and a little bit special. Not just another ring in the till, another tally on the chart and another invoice to process, because let’s face it, nobody likes to be ‘sold’ to. In fact, the best salespeople are those who sell to you without you even realising you are being sold to. This is why networking has become the new cold-calling - think about it. We as a customer want to feel valued, like the hard- earned money we are spending is appreciated. Some of the best experiences I have had when staying at hotels, dining at restaurants or even getting my car washed, are when I have had actual conversations and a bit of a laugh with the waiter/receptionist/bar tender, when they have taken the time to ask me questions, get to know me and make my experience just that little bit extra, going above and beyond the call of duty. That understandably overused cliché of ‘people buy people’ really comes into play here, as we wouldn’t spend our money with someone we didn’t like that much and if we did, it is likely we would feel regretful and unhappy about it, we’d wish we had gone with their competitor down the road who may not have been offering exactly what we were after, but who certainly would have made up for it with enthusiasm and appreciation. Sometimes this is all that it takes to bag the deal with me, in fact most of the time. As humans, we are continually on the quest for connection - even on a subconscious level, so the answer is simple – connect with your audience. Fiona Duncan-Steer, founder of RSViP Business Networking Agency, explains the importance of being ‘people’ focused instead of ‘customer’ focused. East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk NETWORKING How customer focused are you? We as businesses cannot afford to get it wrong anymore. With so many competitors out there doing what we do, most markets are saturated, so what stops someone walking a few yards down the road to give their money to your competitor who offers virtually the same thing as you, but just does it with a smile? Mistakes happen yes, no one is perfect, but as a business you cannot afford to be consistently complacent, blindly proceeding with lack of care in anyone or anything besides what they can do for you - particularly in a post pandemic world. ‘Service with a smile’ as they say is most certainly the way forward to capturing the attention of your audience and you’re seventy five percent of the way there in securing business if you have taken the time to get to know what it is your customer wants and needs. Most of the time people don’t even know what it is they need, that’s your job to work that out, so communicating effectively, in order to establish whether what they need is something you can offer them is ultimately very clever business. Granted you won’t be able to help everyone and again should you accept and admit this early on, it will save a lot of time, will not go unnoticed and will in fact be appreciated and you will be remembered for your honesty – instead of trying to manage expectations and not quite delivering on your promises, resulting in the opposite intention of business self-sabotage. Being people focused within your business and putting relationship building at the forefront of everything you do is a sure-fire way to laying a healthy and solid foundation for your business, which in turn will only grow and thrive from there. You will be remembered and recommended for your efforts, you will see longevity and higher customer retention and you will build a reputable brand with strong values with people at the core - something that many businesses don’t do because their tunnel vision for ‘bagging the sale’ overtakes everything else. So, ask yourself, instead of being ‘customer’ focused, could you be a little more ‘people’ focused instead? 36-37.qxp_Layout 1 04/05/2022 10:04 Page 1Fiona Duncan-Steer, RSViP www.rsvipnetwork.co.uk www.fionaduncansteer.com 36-37.qxp_Layout 1 04/05/2022 10:04 Page 2 East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT W ith rising energy costs impacting not only the cost of living but the cost of doing business, the East Midlands must step up its response to the climate emergency. The UK government became the first major economy to pass laws to end its contribution to climate change by 2050, aiming to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero. The East Midlands is making its own commitments, not least of all spurred by impending Net Zero commercial property regulations that will soon come into force. A transition to renewables is clear, from investment in offshore wind farms to a focus on hydrogen as a clean energy source, and a wider range of energy options are coming to the forefront as businesses and the public look to gain better value for money and become more interested in how their energy is generated. This will only be compounded by the fact that all commercial properties will need to be able to show an EPC report of C by 2025 and B by 2030 or face fines. This has yet to spark a renewable revolution in most cases, what with post-lockdown and the war in Ukraine dominating the headlines, but with only three years to go before the first of the Net Zero targets, that is likely to change, and it would be best if local businesses got on top of the issue sooner rather than later. While our region hosts forward- thinking research, policy and facilities, with the climate emergency and net-zero goals in mind, businesses in all sectors will need to play their part to operate more sustainably, reducing greenhouse gas emissions to not just help achieve government aims but improve their bottom line. Mitigating a business’s carbon footprint is beneficial on numerous levels. Of course one helps the environment but making this commitment can also increase sales from conscious consumers, see one win business from those seeking suppliers that will improve the carbon emissions Improving the bottom line Improving the bottom line The cost of living has risen thanks to spiralling energy prices, but soon the cost of doing business may go the same way – it’s time for East Midlands businesses to take a proactive step toward improving energy efficiency, not just for clout or PR, but for their own bottom lines. 40 Á 38-41.qxp_Layout 1 04/05/2022 10:06 Page 1www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT 38-41.qxp_Layout 1 04/05/2022 10:06 Page 2Next >