training

ASTD Report – New Factors Compound the Growing Skills Shortage

/ SupremeCmdr / Leave a comment

February 2010 Bridging Skills Gap – Free – ASTD

Click on the link above and you’ll be taken to the original source article for the statistics provided below.  The charts themselves came from a newsletter called Workforce Training.  The percentages in bold are my emphasis.  Scary statistics but fixable.

Did I mention we conduct skills gap analysis and custom training to address the gaps?

SKILL GAPS
 Seventy-nine percent of 1,179 companies surveyed by the American Society for Training & Development said they had a skill gap. The respondents listed their highest priority gaps as:
Skills of the current workforce do not match changes in company strategy, goals, markets or business models: 51%
Not enough bench strength in the company’s leadership ranks: 40%
Recent merger/acquisition where the organization brought in new employees or current employees are not up to speed on the new industry: 35
Training investments have been cut or there is lack of commitment by senior leaders to employee learning and development: 27
When hiring for certain types of jobs, there are too few qualified candidates (i.e., a gap in the pipeline): 25%
Lack of skilled talent in one or more of the company’s lines of business: 21%
Source: “Bridging the Skills Gap,” American Society for Training & Development, 2009
WHERE THE GAPS ARE
 The same companies listed these as their greatest skill needs:
Leadership/executive level skills: 50%
Basic skills (traditional building blocks of business-level competencies): 46%
Professional or industry-specific skills: 41%
Managerial/supervisory skills: 31
Customer service skills: 31
Communication/interpersonal skills: 31
Technical/IT/systems skills: 30
Sales skills: 30
Process and project management skills: 20
Other: 43
Source: “Bridging the Skills Gap,” American Society for Training & Development, 2009

Employer Provided Training – What Training?

/ SupremeCmdr / Leave a comment

Copied shamelessly from Workforce Training Management e-newsletter.

METRICS
Formal Training Hours Consumed per Learner, by Industry, 2007 and 2008
Bersin & Associates reports that the drops in formal training hours from 2007 to 2008 is not necessarily a bad thing. “For smart companies, this means that they are cutting programs that are generic, low value and under-utilized,” analyst Karen O’Leonard writes. “We have talked with several organizations that are now carefully scrutinizing the value of their learning programs, some by employing cost-benefit analyses to their initiatives. Their analyses have led them to cancel some programs that were costly to run and offered relatively low value.”
Industry

2007

2008
Pharmaceuticals 35.3 25.2
Banking/finance * n/a 20.2
Manufacturing 29.4 19.5
Business services/consulting n/a 19.1
Telecommunications 31.7 18.9
Banking/financial services & insurance * 28.0 18.8
Insurance* n/a 16.8
Retail 14.0 15.3
Technology 21.9 14.3
Health care/medical 24.0 14.1
* In 2007, small sample size required that insurance industry results be combined with those of banking and financial services. For 2008, there was a large enough sample of banking /financial services and insurance companies to break them out. The individual industries’ data are shown, as well as the combined category.
Source: “Corporate Learning Factbook,” 2009, Bersin & Associates

PSST…Wanna Learn How to Write a Cancer Abstract?

/ SupremeCmdr / Leave a comment

I’ve always felt that good writing comes from good thinking and that learning how to write well is difficult.   With the advent of the Internet you can find wonderful teaching websites for the craft of writing.   My inner underwriter has always believed that if underwriters were taught how to write about disease we could ultimately better understand some of the cryptic medical language found in the APS’s we read every day.  Well you’ll never guess what I found while doing some purposeful surfing (not mindless).

I’ve added a link to the training modules from the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program at Emory University, Atlanta SEER Cancer Registry, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.

This training website provides web-based training modules for cancer registration and surveillance. When the site is complete, it will comprise about 30 training modules, each covering a particular cancer registration training subject. The site started in September, 2000 and is under continual development.

And to think all I wanted was to find out a little more about recurrent high grade focal dysplasia just to make sure the pathologist was on spot about the colonic mass despite everyone else calling the thing cancer.  I’m gonna have some fun playing around in this website.