It’s an adage that during a downturn, learning and development budgets will be the first to go. But what are some key challenges HR practitioners face, and what are they doing? Lee Xieli finds out.
Tina Oh
Human resource manager
City Developments Limited
One of the challenges we faced during this economic downturn is finding new priorities for our learning and development programmes. As the downturn begins to bite, we realise the need to harness the skill sets of our people, to prepare them for the current as well as future challenges. As the government has done much through SPUR to encourage companies to send their employees for training, we are tapping on such available funding resources to send our people for relevant SPUR training courses.
For this year, we are tapping on the ESS Initiative and Innovation Workshop for our supervisors and operations staff and are also looking at enhancing the negotiation skills of our managers. We are also looking beyond traditional training to other forms of learning where our people can gain knowledge and further value add make a contribution to the organisation.
One such initiative that we have introduced is a platform titled “Insight CDL” forum. Every month, a department will present their department’s objectives, scope of work, accomplishments and contributions. Here, staff can understand each department’s operations better and exchange ideas.
Imeelia Ismail
Senior vice president for corporate development
Cherie Hearts Group International
Training and re-training of staff is one of the key philosophies of the organisation. This is especially true of the early childhood industry, where our people are our most treasured assets. At the same time, we do see a trend of many people from various fields joining the industry. These are mostly career changers and those who have been retrenched.
Thankfully, this process [of retraining childcare centre teachers for corporate roles] has been mostly seamless. Although these individuals come straight from the childcare centres, they are able to adapt to the corporate side quite easily. With a common goal of delivering quality services to children and their parents, the transition is quite smooth. They are able to apply their prior knowledge and experience of early childhood perspective to the current tasks and projects they undertake.
The key to addressing such a challenge is firstly to have a very good understanding of the staff’s needs and expectations from the job. Having established this would greatly facilitate the formulation of goals and objectives of the job. A focused approach to training, as well as support especially in the initial stage, is crucial.
Lee Yunn Peong Paul
Group human resource manager
UOL Group
While there is no retrenchment and the training budget remains the same, part of my challenge is getting the staff to fulfil the training needs, attend the training programmes scheduled for them and also find time to train their staff. It’s not cost efficient if we came up with the training material and few of them show up. Another challenge is finding the appropriate training for them. It is important that we remain relevant and always able to meet the needs of times in an age of constant change and renewal.
Now we are focusing more on talent management to groom future leaders for the company. We see the economy has changed and we are growing so we may need people to go overseas to take care of our new companies. We are currently identifying the high potentials to be groomed and also creating a mentorship programme where the current leaders can be mentors and groom our young potentials and future leaders. The programme will most likely roll out this year or next year.
