Internal Training – Reducing Costs, Increasing Value

Sarah Kent, deputy managing director at Haslimann Taylor, writes:

As part of our annual staff survey, we always ask our people what they value about working at HT. One aspect that is always up there with flexi-time, our annual away day and the snack machine, is training. Haslimann Taylor has always prided itself on investing in its people, but the current economic climate has presented us with an interesting challenge – how to maximise the potential of our team whilst getting a bigger bang from our training buck.

For us, and for many companies, the answer lies pretty close to home. We have a real mix of experience and expertise at HT – ex print and broadcast journos, former in-house professionals, those whose background is agency through and through and not to mention some with a career in the profession spanning nearly three decades (no names mentioned!).

Although we had tapped into this wealth of knowledge on an ad-hoc basis in the past, we had never created a formalised internal training programme. So in April we launched the HT Academy – a series of training courses for HT people by HT people.

I’d be lying if I said that saving costs wasn’t a significant driver, but when the feedback forms came in, it soon became apparent that we had a real win-win situation on our hands – lower cost training that the team felt was actually more valuable than many external courses (and better still, they wouldn’t be cancelled at the last minute because too many people had dropped out to make it worth the trainer’s while to travel up to the Midlands from London).

Developing and maintaining an in-house training programme does take commitment and time. It is vital that it is given the same importance and approached with the same professionalism as paid-for courses. We ensured that we trained the trainers and always provide course outlines, delegates packs, post-training feedback forms and, of course, refreshments.

The most powerful aspect of internal training, whatever industry you’re in, is that it can be tailored in a way that external courses simply can’t be. We keep groups small, because it doesn’t cost any more to run three training courses rather than one, and because we know the people so well, we can adapt the level, tone and content accordingly. We use a mixture of industry best practice and real examples from our own clients and we are able to deliver what we believe is a competitive advantage by ensuring that the HT culture and ‘the way we do things’ always underpins the theory.

Everyone will always have an element of external training in their annual schedule – it’s vital that we provide a well-rounded approach and keep ahead of the game in ever-evolving areas such digital communications. But the HT Academy is here to stay and we believe its graduates will be better than ever.