HR Focus – Training Needs Analysis (TNA), recruiting students, manage overtime

Performing a Training Needs Analysis

The business benefits of performing a Training Needs Analysis (TNA) go beyond personal development. The process links a business’s people with its wider strategic demand for skills. The end-result of a TNA is personal development, but it also ensures that such development delivers desired and measurable improvements to business performance.

A deep knowledge of your business’s strategic objectives is crucial. HR must know what skills a company needs now, to consolidate and improve business performance in the short term. In addition, HR must be aware of the long-term strategic direction of the business. They must ask: where is the business going, and what additional skills are required to get there?

Establishing links between business strategy and HR is therefore the first and foremost step to take when performing a TNA. Without this connection, and without a TNA, you might wonder what exactly your training bucks are buying you.

Find out more – Training needs analysis

Train to Gain skills brokers can help you with your TNA.
Find out more about Train to Gain

Recruiting students: the benefits

Summer is approaching; a busy time for businesses losing workers to the sun, and a time when skilled and highly motivated students are looking for work experience. Could it be that the latter offers a solution to the former?

Recruiting students – in a temporary or longer-term placement capacity – brings its fair share of challenges: recruitment and training being the most glaring. But what about the benefits?

Students can provide valuable cover for full-time workers jetting off on holiday, relieving the pressure on those left behind, and alleviating the back-to-work pains of returning workers. And despite their lack of experience and potential need for training, students can positively impact your business in ways you might not have considered. Their academic perspective, youthful ambition and varied backgrounds could inject fresh and diverse thinking and insights into your business.

Remember too that temporary and placement positions aren’t necessarily a one-time deal. Establishing strong relationships with students can offer employers a flexible pool of talent that remains available on a longer-term basis. It’s not uncommon for a student studying a three-year course to return to work with a company every summer, and subsequently begin working for them permanently after their course has finished. Such longer-term relationships save on recruitment costs and offer you flexible, highly talented workers.

There are several organisations and schemes around which aim to connect businesses and students. Take EDT, a charity running development schemes for young people interested in careers in science, engineering and technology. EDT’s ‘The Year in Industry’ programme provides paid, degree-relevant work placements for students in the year out before their degree course. EDT explain the benefits: “Students get the experience that recruiters and universities are looking for and improve their degree and employment prospects, and companies get access to highly motivated and talented individuals whilst benefiting from a highly cost effective resource”. The Shell Step Programme is another scheme designed to help small businesses develop their potential by using the skills of undergraduates to work on specific business projects. “Businesses benefit from fresh ideas and the chance to address problems or opportunities for which time and resources are normally lacking.”

If you can meet the challenge of recruitment and view the process as an opportunity rather than a chore, recruiting student and placement workers might be worth considering. Look around, learn more about the organisations and schemes available in your area, and decide if such an approach is right for your business. You never know, it could make your summer a little easier.

Interactive tool – Choose the right type of flexible working

More info – The Year in Industry Programme

More info – Shell Step Programme

Manage overtime

Overtime working is routinely used by many businesses as a way of coping with changes in demand or labour shortages. If you frequently require employees to work overtime, this could be a sign of inefficiency in your business.

Unless there are special provisions in an employee’s contract, you must get their agreement to work overtime.

This guide covers the legal and management issues concerning overtime working, as well as the pros and cons of using overtime to deal with demand changes. It also looks at some of the alternatives to overtime working which may be cheaper or more flexible to operate. Click here to view the guide .