Training is for dogs, I was once told. Sounds a bit drastic? Especially when the person that said it was someone I would have described as a trainer. However, they soon put me in my place and told me that they were a people 'developer', not a trainer. So I quickly learnt that training is something you do for animals, but people need developing.

What's this got to do with recruitment, anyway? Well for the past couple of years training has been a hot topic, with the 'skills gap' almost constantly in the news. Anyone involved in HR and recruitment won't have escaped the bombardment of newsletters and flyers from their local Business Link or local college, all backed by a plethora of government-backed training initiatives and promises of all sorts of funding. These may all be well meaning but exactly who decides on the priority areas to focus on and who decides what gets funded and what doesn't? The answer would appear to be the government.

Now, I'm not a big fan of the government getting too involved in business. They may do things that are well meaning but having started out alright, all too often the priorities of those 'helping' and those businesses being 'helped' can quickly drift apart. Sometimes there are 'gaps' in the market for good reason. There's simply no demand for those things be they products or skills.

However, some people, often politicians, see gaps as things that need to be filled and so government departments create schemes to fund them. What happens next is that because they've then got their own internal targets, any funding is aimed solely at trying to meet these and sometimes that can lead to situations where normal business logic goes out the window and the whole process becomes supply and product-focused rather than the demand-led initiative it is supposed to be.

Of course training isn't only for dogs. You can't develop anything without getting the foundations right in the first place. However, once those skills are in place what sets people apart are very much those intangible things that our clients are always asking us for attitude, creativity, a positive outlook and the ability to think on their feet. Some of these may be innate but many can be developed. That development requires investment.

When times are tough any form of financial assistance is welcome but just because something is being funded in part or whole doesn't mean it will offer the best value in the long term. We've all got to focus on what's right for us and our businesses. These should be decisions for us to make, not the government. So when it comes to making training and development decisions let's not forget it's the dog that wags the tail and not vice versa.


Guy Moreton is director of recruitment practitioner MorePeople.

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