Firms invest more in training to keep talent: survey
An employment consulting body on Monday said companies are spending more in staff training and development to try to retain talent. The Hong Kong Institute of Human Resource Management surveyed 107 companies in 20 industries between February and April.  It found that 74 percent of them allocated money on staff training and development, and these budgets have increased compared with the same period last year. The average annual training time per staff member has also gone up, from just over 14 hours to 18 hours. Banking and financial service, business service and professional service, and wholesale import-export are the three industries that have seen major increases in the training budget. Chester Tsang, co-chairman of the institute’s learning and development committee, said companies are spending more money on training to try to stay competitive and retain employees.  “Because of the changing business environment and also a shortage of manpower, a lot of companies use different learning methodologies to train up the employees,” he said. “For frontline staff, companies put a lot of investment on the product service knowledge enhancement, simply because they are suffering from a lot of staff turnover. "For middle management, we can see there's a shift of learning focus to building effective teams, because work from home is the common practice in most organisations.  "For senior management, in view of the dynamic business operating environment, a lot of companies put a lot of investment on strategy thinking and also change management training.” Tsang added that more companies will be using technology to train staff in future. “There's a trend of organisations adopting digital learning technology, say webinars, virtual classroom, training videos, digital learning portal, 3D learning library, blended learning, and also mobile learning such as smartphone or tablet,” he said.  “There's a model for learning anywhere, anytime. Through this digital learning platform, I'm sure a lot of companies provide just-in-time learning to different levels of staff.”