Today’s corporate world is very vigorous; to stay ahead in the game businesses need people who are multi-talented and dynamic who can handle the technical as well as the non-technical evolutions in the industry and can come up with creative solutions to those challenges.

Realizing the importance of human resources, corporations have started incurring huge expenditure on account of the training and development of their talent. In this competitive industry retaining a talented workforce is another challenge for corporations, training and retention stats have shown a positive correlation in the past. Let’s delve into the importance of training at work and how it helps with employee retention.

Why is training important at work?

It’s not to assume that trained personnel will be better at doing the job when compared with an individual who hadn’t got any training for the job. From a broader perspective, training can be seen as a method to instill discipline to perform a given task in an organized manner. So, how does it change things?

Imagine doing a task without any predefined instructions or training manual, you might be able to complete the task but what’s important to observe here is the time taken to complete the task. That’s how efficiency is defined and measure, for big corporations it’s not about just doing the task it’s all about efficiently doing the job that would save time and money for the company.

Training new employees in the company help them to understand the work culture and the company’s expectations. It helps to align their performance and expectations from the work creating a pool of satisfied workforce. Initial training programs are work-oriented, they give emphasis on skill development and knowledge building that will help the employee to do the job effectively. Apart from developing new skills training also helps in honing the old ones. The improved know-how to do the job benefits the corporations in the long run by the means of increased employee productivity.

In addition to this, training also helps corporations to save money that they would otherwise spend on hiring new talent from outside by developing a competitive in-house human resource pool. Leadership is among one of the most important factors when it comes to the longevity of the business, a robust training curriculum also helps with nurturing the leadership qualities in employees who can expand the business even further.

How does it help employee retention?

Employee retention can be understood in the context of employee turnover ratio, the employee turnover ratio can be defined as the percentage of workers who leave the organization and are replaced by new employees. It can be calculated by dividing the number of employees who left the company by the average number of employees during a given time frame. Employee retention can be understood as the ability of an organization to retain its talent pool.

So how exactly does training help with employee retention? Well, starting with on-board training experience, research studies have shown that a well-designed on-board training experience increases the probability of employee retention for companies.

Imagine a scenario where the newcomer has to find out about everything without any guidance, compare this to a situation with a well-balanced onboarding program that provides the recruit with all the information about the company and the departments within. Naturally, the second scenario will lead to a satisfied and productive employee.

As per statistical data, the worldwide turnover rate is around 11%, the turnover rates vary for different industries with the securities industry having the highest turnover rate at 100%. This further increases in the case of nascent stage start-ups with a turnover rate of over 400%. Start-ups are not very structure and they don’t have a robust training program in place, partly due to budget constraints. This has an impact on their sky-high turnover rates.