In these challenging economic times,
many companies are cutting back
and one of the first expenses to be eliminated
is training and development.
Some employees use this as an excuse
to not take courses.
They say things like
‘if we pay for it ourselves,
the company won’t ever pay for it again.’
That’s B.S.
Without a training budget,
there is no formal reporting process.
If it doesn’t get reported,
it doesn’t get measured.
If it doesn’t get measured,
it doesn’t exist at the executive level.
As far as they’re concerned,
no one is getting trained.
Which means if your boss wants to brag about
how his staff is taking courses
on their own initiative,
he doesn’t throw out numbers,
he talks about individuals and individual training.
Instead of saying 86% of his team
met personal development objectives,
he says ‘K took a course on marketing using Twitter.’
And because others aren’t willing
to pay for the course themselves
and Twitter is a fairly new marketing tool,
K suddenly becomes the company expert.
THAT is why having the training budget cut
is not necessarily a bad thing,
not for an employee with initiative.