Employee Training HQ

Everyone likes to talk about the advantages of training and development of employees, or the importance of work training, but when was the last time you read anything about the disadvantages of training your staff or the negatives of employment training. Well this is your opportunity to see the other side of the story; reasons why training employees can be a disadvantage.

Let’s take a look at the Top Ten Reasons why training employees is not a good idea.

# 10 Online training depersonalizes the process. New employees would rather learn from someone face-to-face versus one-on-one with a computer. It’s more fun working with someone who can answer questions and add some energy into the process.

# 9 Information changes and whatever you learn today will probably change by next month or next week, so what’s the purpose of training something that in time will no longer be relevant or accurate. You’ll just have to do the training all over again.

# 8 Training is distracted by all the activities and action around the training area. Now of course training by yourself in some dark corner of an office is no good, however training while you’re in a busy work area is unsettling.

# 7 Scheduling issues can make it difficult to arrange for training. It’s possible too many employees are being trained at one time or too few. If the new employees need to be part of the work flow quickly, then their training may be inadequate or rushed just to get the job training completed. If the focus is to get the employee training done quick versus getting it done right, then it’s like reading every other word of a book; it won’t make much sense and more questions are left unanswered than were answered.

# 6 The wrong person is doing the training. It takes a special person to be a trainer; they have to have a passion for training and they have to know what they’re talking about.
Employees being trained can quickly ascertain if the person doing the training is knowledgeable, competent, and approachable. The wrong trainer can do more harm than good.

# 5 Losing control of the training content. This is especially concerning if the training is being conducted by an outside company. If the material being presented is not what’s needed for proper training, then the expense of that employee training is wasted.

# 4 Orientation training is not specific. It’s advantageous for each portion of the training to be presented by a person who works in that department. If it’s asset control, then someone from assets protection should conduct that portion of employee training; if the topic presented is HR related, then bring in someone from HR to lead that training.
Too often one trainer is trying to present everything, and much information is missed.

# 3 Sufficient time is not allowed for covering all the training material, and there is not enough time for questions and answers. If the time allotted for training is insufficient for the amount of information in the training program, then either more time needs to be set aside for the training, or less material needs to be presented. If you’re going to train employees, you might as well do it right.

# 2 Different learning levels of those being trained can cause some to be bored because it’s too elementary or it may cause others to be frustrated because it’s too complicated and the purpose of the employee training may be lost from the start.

# 1. Probably the biggest disadvantage to employee training is that it is too expensive. Someone has to be paid to do the training either externally or internally. Whomever is doing the training is being taken away from some other job responsibility, so rather than productive work being accomplished elsewhere it is being spent on training. When employees are hired, they are hired to do a job, and typically they are needed quickly.
So the training takes away from any productive work they could be doing.

So as you can see there are disadvantages to employee training. Much depends upon the complexity of the job an employee is hired to do, I think you can safely say that some type of employee training needs to occur. The question is how much training is necessary.