JUNE 2013
world,.goes quite a way in ensuring they maintain a standard. The university is backed up with online training modules that staff can complete at their own pace. This is supported by external certification. At Deloitte a lot of the soft skills need to be refreshed after a certain time frame or after a promotion. They also have a strong focus on training in areas like preserving independence and protecting the
A lot of the soft skills need to be refreshed
client’s confidentiality.
Renjen says that harassment policy is also a course that is taught and refreshed often. Abdul Malik Said, based in the UK, says that in addition to technical and functional training and compliance with governance training, trainers also need to look carefully at whether regulatory and legal training requirements have been met.
Trainers should be scheduling training at a relevant time as well. It should be “just in time” as opposed to carried out during a lull, say, 6 months before the skills are actually required.
Another very important aspect that Malik adds is the need for feedback from the employees on the impact of the training. This is Miller’s fifth step as well. Without evaluation and feedback, neither the firm nor the individual will be able to continue to develop or to grow.
Kruti Barucha, a Senior Director based at the India arm of US company CEB, cites recent international studies that they carried out. CEB offers a benchmarking service that advises best practices for their high profile members, who tend to sit at a CFO level of Fortune 500 companies or the equivalent.
Barucha says that most CFO’s were found to be unhappy with the mix of talent in their teams. In a study of 2200 finance professionals,
over 75 companies they came up with five categories – Builder, Persuader, Strategist, Learner and Doer. According to a recent CEB report, “finance teams that invest in a key “Pathfinder” skill set – a combination of Builder, Strategist and Persuader competencies – are three times more likely to make strategic business decisions, twice as likely to be highly productive, and nearly three times more likely to be strong in attracting and retaining the best talent”. Interestingly enough their research found that coaching is the single most effective way of improving competencies. A sentiment mirrored by Renjen, who says that staff are taught by ‘doing’ instead of just learning in a classroom format. “Coaching is a much more effective way of building talent and is considered to be much more effective than a one size fits all training module or development program that may be easier to roll out”.
Barucha says, “Slightly more progressive companies will use competency models but will get the right mix between the one size fits all (classroom) model and the needs of the individual.” They map competency gaps at the individual level and not at the team level, which results in training for these individuals being more meaningful”. Competency improvement is driven more by coaching and less by training and it is where this coaching takes place that the best results have been found. Barucha says “In Asia, people focus on functional competency improvements. Software training, for example, will take precedence over soft skill training like negotiations. In North America, Europe and Australia, however, the focus is more on building the person’s soft skill set and coaching their competencies in areas like leadership, teamwork, management and communication and the effects are directly visible.” A learning and development contemporary of Renjen’s at one of the ‘big-4’ in India, who preferred not to be named, agrees that there is a cultural difference in training
and learning. She chalks it down to the difference in culture as a whole and says: “In India, people are still getting used to the idea of ‘self-learning’ as this is not familiar or the way we have been taught in school here”. She says that expectations of a facilitator are also very different here. While in the West it is acceptable for a facilitator to not have the answers or to say ‘I will get back to you’, in India those doing the learning expect their facilitators to know the subject matter through and through. Our contact went on to say that there is also a difference between the East and West when it comes to learning accountability. In the West people tend to be more accountable for their own actions, whilst in India there is still a little bit of ‘mothering’ required at corporate level.
She agrees that Indians have often focused on technical know- how before dealing with soft skills but says that this can also be down to what industry the person is working in.
She also says that when the pool that one is employing from has enough trained individuals then the need for technical training goes down. It’s only when there is a shortfall of appropriate candidates that the need for technical training happens right away. We work in a time where retention is important and helps maintain the company’s bottom
Map gaps at the individual level, not team level
line. Most medium and larger employers understand the value of training both in the technical sphere and for softer skills. How aggressively a company
focuses on the various aspects of training, how successfully they carry them out and their effectiveness seem, at least at first glance, to be based not on cultural boundaries but rather on the culture of the organization.
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