Tips for next year Budgeting

This is the time of the year that the majority of businesses are investing significant amount of time and effort towards planning their next year’s success. Business plans, marketing plans, activity plans, sales plans and business spending budgets are all amongst the activities. As you and your company go about formulating your strategy and budget, ensure that the learning and development component is not missed out of the plan. Investing in employee training is a critical strategy for business success.

Given the market dynamic, competitiveness and profit margins of the animal protein business, prioritizing learning and development is vital. Trained and skilled professionals perform better, are proven to be more effective, and critically will respond to change at a faster pace. All attributes which a business needs for it to thrive. Not forgetting, ‘people are considered to be a big competitive advantage of a company today’.

Underfunding learning and development and training programs can have serious repercussions for your organization. Here are some key risks:

• Widening skill gaps: struggle to keep up with industry changes

• Diminished customer experience: struggling to understand and meet the everchanging customer needs, leading to negative experiences

• Decreased productivity: more mistakes, slower processes, and reduced efficiency across your workforce

To have a real impact and a management buy-in for training requests, your learning and development plan and budget needs to be aligned with the business goals. Meaning training should not be a ‘tick the box’ activity and has to go beyond fulfilling regulatory requirements. Training should actively support growth, yours and that of the company.

A well-structured learning and development budget should be tied to key business metrics like:

• Productivity

• Customer satisfaction

• Innovation / Response to rapid change 

Programs that address significant skills gaps or support strategic goals should be prioritized. Such programs generally revolve around gaining a holistic understanding as to how the industry works and/or taking a deep dive into job specifics. Here are some training program examples implemented by successful companies;

• Nutrition department to be trained on how feed mills go about converting their work into a finished product and how they can help optimize the process

• Farm managers gaining a holistic understanding on how various inputs such as ventilation, feeding, water, house layouts etc. will affect performance and what needs doing to avoid losses

• Customer facing professionals training on soft skills that encourage conversations, information sharing, business relationship building and value creation for all involved and not just pushing of products and services.     

A clear learning and development plan and budget helps gain the trust and support of company leaders. When you show exactly how the money is spent and what results it brings, executives see that learning and development is important for the business’s success, not just an extra cost. It also builds trust with finance and HR teams, who are more likely to back learning and development when they see the budget connected to real business goals.

Selecting your training and development activities is crucial to your growth and success!

At Progressus we specialize in putting together high impact trainings that not only reflect the industry realities, they also guarantee the return for your learning and development investment.

As companies strive for sustained growth and competitiveness, investing in employee development emerges as a strategic imperative. Talk to Progressus and get the support you need to make your learning and development plan a reality.