You may be so good in your field, knowing everything you need to know about the product and services you render but, you can make your business better, by learning new skills.
Many business owners manage multiple skills in different disciplines, although, that is not their first line of professional calling. Enlarging your skill set and helping your employees to enlarge theirs help to place your business on a steady growth path.
In this article, we will outline four important reasons why you should learn new skills today
It will help you to manage your business better
You do not need to have a degree in management or marketing for you to be good in these areas. If you want to learn how to manage people or even market your product well, you need to first build an interest in management and marketing. Once you build the interest, you can look for a place around or even online, enroll to take a course on management or marketing in your free time. Initially, it will not be easy. It will be stressful but, in the end, it will worth the effort invested.
You will gain skills that would enable you to manage people, materials and even resources. It will do your business just good. In as much as you would need someone to manage the business for you, you will not be so reliant on them. If there is any need to fire the individual, you will quickly fire the person without thinking about the consequences.
Marketing
In the area of marketing, good marketing requires engagement, high-level engagement. Marketers are usually the live wire of any organization. For any organization to make steady progress, that organization need the services of marketers, professional marketers.
As a business owner, you do not need to leave your business solely at the hands of external marketers. If you do, the business may not grow to your anticipated level.
You need to take courses in marketing and engagement. If you do, then it would help you not to be over-reliant on external marketers. Yes, you need them because you cannot be everywhere at the same time but, you will not rely on them.
In addition to talking to people yourself to convince them to buy from you, when your marketers are not engaging your prospects in the right manner, you can easily dictate it, train them, for the benefit of your business. Training helps you to manage your business in a better manner.
Allows you to tell the public that you have expertise in a particular field
In whatever field that you acquire a skill, bear in mind that you have just placed another feather to your business acumen cap, that would help you to convince your client that you are a professional in that field.
A particular field may not be your primary constituency in terms of professional calling but acquiring a skill and earning a certificate in that area, will tell your clients that yes, they are at the right place. If a client is looking for a particular service, walks into your office, sees a certificate or a plague confirming your certification in that field, it will boost the confidence of the client to do business with you.
More effective employees
There is an African proverb that says, if you develop the ability to help others to grow, you will surely grow beyond boundaries. Another says, train up another person’s child and help build the society. If as a business owner, you invest in helping your employees to acquire more skills, you will have more productive employees and loyal staff.
As a CEO, when you pay for staff training, it will improve your operations and even help your recruitment process.
For any business to continue to grow, the staff need to be hardworking, smart and in line with modern realities. Whenever you invest in your employee’s training, you are adding more versatility to their operation and you are helping them to be in line with modern realities in our society. Your business will be a major beneficiary because you will be making them more productive, more loyal and committed to the organization.
In addition to that, you will be helping your recruitment process. If your employees are well trained and versatile in different field, while trying to conduct a recruitment exercise, you wouldn’t need to employ the services of consultants to do that. You will use your well-trained staff and you can be sure that you will have the best join your team.
You will have fewer problems
A lack of skills in a particular field as related to your organization, will not only limit the operation of the organization in that particular field, it could lead to serious problems for the organization. Example, if you are running a computer school, you only have staff that are good in their area of competence before they joined your organization, you will lack capacity in other areas when you begin to have students that are interested in these other fields of information technology.
You will miss additional business opportunities, you will miss more money and you will even miss more opportunities to have a more positive company review, which usually lead to more referrals.
If you develop the habit of training your employees, in areas beyond their initial area of competence, your organization will be a major beneficiary.
Avoid troubles
Training can help your organization to avoid lots of trouble. If you train your employees on health, safety, and environment, it will help save both your staff and your business in times of either natural or man-made disaster.
Whenever any sort of disaster occurs in an organization, the first responders are usually the staff of the organization. Assume, there is a fire incident in your office building, before the fire service personnel would be alerted and their arrival time frame, a lot would have been damaged. But with the knowledge they have as a result of the skill they acquired from health, services, and environment, they would be able to mobilize, minimize or even deal with the fire before the fire service would arrive.
Imagine they have no such skill; the building would most likely be completely burnt down before the arrival of the fire service personnel.
Another scenario still applies. The human resource department in an organization is usually in charge of staff recruitment, training, and implementation of any law enacted by the state as regards the employees of the organization. If you don’t train them to be in line with the new mechanism in the field and also for them to be abreast with new government laws, it could cost you a lot. You could violate state and federal laws out of ignorance, which could lead to government fines, penalties or even lawsuit.
We can never overemphasize the importance of skill acquisition. Acquire more skills today, help your employees to acquire more skills, seat, watch your organization grow to an enviable height.
JERRY EGBO
STAFF, BIZMARROW TECHNOLOGIES.
