Staff training and development is important for your business.

Ongoing development will:

• improve your employees' skills specific to your business
• keep you and your employees up to date in areas such as administration and management

Training new employees

When new staff members begin working in your business, they'll need to be trained to fulfill their role. You might need to rely on other staff members to help you do this.

You can also have senior staff mentor juniors – just make sure it's a good use of the senior employee's time and abilities.

See Staff induction and probationary review for information about checking in with new employees during their probationary period.

Skills development for existing employees

Your existing employees might need to upskill so they can:

• develop their own careers
• stay challenged and engaged
• keep up with changes to your business's circumstances, like technology, laws or social factors

You might need to modify an employee's role to cope with a change to your business, which will trigger the need for further training.

Providing your employees with ongoing training is also a great way to improve:

• productivity
• quality or output
• customer satisfaction
• employee job satisfaction

In-house professional development

A cost-effective way of meeting your skill needs is by building on the talents you already have. You can do this by:

• having staff members train each other so useful skills aren't lost when employees are absent from work or leave their roles
• developing the skills of existing staff with refresher courses, seminars and online tutorials

Use our workforce information template to review your employees' existing skill sets. You might find some of your staff already have the skills you need and can help train others.

Outsourced training and development

Once you know what skills your staff have and have developed them as much as possible, you need to work out if there are gaps remaining.

If you can't fill the skill gaps in-house:

• hire staff with the skills you need
• outsource to contractors or companies with the necessary skills
• have existing staff trained professionally, either on or off site

The Department of Education and Training's Victorian Skills Gateway can provide you with guidance and support for training your staff.