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Training and Development Manager

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AVG. SALARY

$99,870

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EDUCATION

Bachelor's degree or higher +

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JOB OUTLOOK

Stable

Interviews

Insider Info

Thomas Ebert is in the business of bridge building. But rather than steel and concrete, he lays the crucial bricks of training between ability and potential for thousands of employees across America.

"There's a definite gap to be filled in the leap from education to the workplace," says Ebert, president and CEO of a training firm in Minnesota. "Employers are spending billions of dollars to fix the mismatch between their needs and the training coming out of high schools and colleges today."

Ebert refers to this "front-line workplace training" as the biggest trend in the training management field today. It includes teaching employees everything from computer skills and upgrades to sexual harassment awareness. With over 3,000 of these "basic trainees" expected to come through Ebert's company's doors this year, such work makes up most of its many contracts.

"Employers are realizing that personnel from all levels of their organizations need training to better suit the actual working world," says Ebert. "We're enlisted to give them a better understanding of how their companies operate, and how they should or shouldn't behave in a corporate environment."

Organizations are also using training to hold on to more employees. Research by the Saratoga Institute, a think-tank which does surveys on human resources issues, suggests that companies with good training have a turnover rate of only 12 percent. That's compared to 41 percent in companies without much of a training budget.

"Training tends to be a top issue in whether employees are retained or not," says Dave Egan, founder and vice-president of provider strategies for an online training resource. "Employee retention and turnover are key issues for companies, and they're willing to pay for it. The costs involved with training are seen as a necessary evil."

Zlatica Roman created her job by selling her training expertise to her current employer. She now travels around to different bank branches to make sure tellers are all working on the same page.

"I have to combine remedial training [training those already skilled] with those I'm starting from scratch with," says Roman. "It's a challenge, but it's important that what the company wants, the company gets from its employees.

"If no one heeded the rules, if everyone worked with their own way of doing things, the number of customer complaints would be horrendous -- customers would be served differently from one day to the next, given different services, it would be very confusing. So employees have to be trained to work under the same banner."

As companies continue to take training more seriously, some are building their own training infrastructure -- corporate universities owned and run by an organization to educate its employees. Other trends include the creation of a new senior-level role -- chief learning officers, who come up with a company's training strategies and carry them out.

"Organizations are empowering themselves by building broader training agendas," says Egan. "They're looking to find ways of making training more manageable and effective. This can include all sorts of training modes, from online courses to the classroom, books, tapes and videos and seminars."

While there are many solutions to training problems, companies first need to figure out what those problems are. Richard Battaglia, executive director of the International Society of Performance Improvement in Washington, D.C., calls this "taking a performance perspective." He says it's among the biggest training trends being planned in boardrooms today.

"We're getting more questions about how to improve employee performance based on informed approaches," says Battaglia. "Before you can decide on training solutions, you have to define what the problems are. That's often more important than training itself, and it's what organizations need to focus on first."

Contact

  • Email Support
  • 1-800-GO-TO-XAP (1-800-468-6927)
    From outside the U.S., please call +1 (424) 750-3900
  • North Dakota Career Resource Network
    ndcrn@nd.gov | (701) 328-9733

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