The Importance of Education in Your Business
– By Angela Turton
Effective and highly-functional teams are a crucial element for any business’ success. Whether you have a small operation or a large company, the people who are doing the daily work can be leveraged to achieve higher results.
Something as simple as having clear and concise job descriptions, conducting ongoing team training, and communicating a mission, vision, and company culture/values helps the people in the organisation find direction and purpose.
Education, Education, Education – to borrow a phrase from a recent election campaign.
Does education stop at 18? At ActionCoach, we believe in lifelong learning, and we also believe that your business will only grow to the limit of your education. We are obviously not expecting all business owners to go back to school and take exams, but being open to learning will enable you to grow your company. It doesn’t just stop with you either, have a culture of learning and education in your business will encourage your team to strive for better and to have the skills to perform at a higher level.
As a chartered accountant, I was introduced to the idea of continuous education from the very beginning of my career. We are obliged to maintain a certain level of professional knowledge and to remain current. I regularly attended technical updates and dutifully log the hours of CPD.
When I set up my own practice, I found that these hours of technical training did not help me with running the business, I had to upskill fast in the subtle art of being a business owner. I was lucky, I had the Institute to help in some respects and a great Business Link advisor who was able to point me in the right direction. Later I was able to take advantage of the now-defunct Growth Accelerator scheme to push my business to the next level.
What sort of education do you need in your business?
The first stage is to provide the training to do the job now, this is the technical knowledge of how to perform the tasks assigned to each staff member. In my case, that would have included tax updates, accounting standard updates as well as how to use Excel, Xero, Sage and Quickbooks. In my husband Rupert’s case, it was Prince2 certification.
Then you will need to think of what training is required to do the next job for that person. Upskilling a person and cross-skilling a team will give you great flexibility and built-in resilience in assigning tasks and allow the business to adapt if staff members have to self-isolate or are off on holiday or for other reasons. Suddenly finding that you are without a key member of staff in your department or business could cause unnecessary delays or interruptions to businesses.
Next to think about, but not necessarily next in chronological order, is the so-called “soft skills”. These are people skills, business acumen skills, thinking skills, and resilience skills. As a business you should aim for a great training programme that encourages staff to work on their whole person will give you a well-rounded, exceptional team that can pull together in times of adversity, celebrate when things go well, and support each other and the business grow.
We recommend that each member of staff has his/her own training plan which is regularly updated and reviewed and that the business keeps a chart of what skills are needed in the business and which staff member has those skills, when they need re-training or re-certification if necessary and who is the next to be trained. Include the technical and the business/life skills in this chart.
There are four levels of learning
Unconscious incompetent – when we don’t know what we don’t know.
Conscious incompetent – when we realise that we don’t have the skills required.
Conscious competent – when we can do the job, but it requires concentration and focus
Unconscious competent – when we do a task without thinking about it.
This is not a static staircase, often when we reach Unconscious competence, we take on a new task or business area and start at the bottom level, or maybe onto the consciously incompetent step
Think about when you learnt to drive a car – as a 16-year-old you didn’t realise how difficult it was, then when you got behind a wheel at 17, you realised how much there was to driving in a straight line, let alone going around corners. As the lessons progressed and you go your exam you were able to drive perfectly competently although it required concentration and focus on your part. Now you probably don’t think about it, and can sometimes go whole journeys and not remember how you got from A to B.
If you decided to get your HGV licence – and who hasn’t thought about it over the last few weeks of supply shortages – you would return to the bottom of the staircase, or at least the second level up, with lessons to learn before you could drive the bigger vehicle as you do your car.
Fundamentally, it is your responsibility to help your staff move up the competency ladder, ensure everyone gets a fair chance at upskilling and lead by example by keeping on top of your own CPD.
