Leadership training identified as top development priority for Iowa businesses

Iowa companies are placing a greater emphasis on the onboarding of new hires and job-specific skills training, according to a new survey from ATW Training Solutions.

ATW’s annual Trends in Talent Development Survey shows that leadership training is a top priority for companies for the third straight year. 71 percent of survey respondents said it was a top training priority. More than 65 percent of respondents identified job-specific skills training as a priority, and 57.9 percent said onboarding new hires is a top focus.

“This could be the result of a continued increase in new hires and a need to accelerate the onboarding process,” said Todd McDonald, president of ATW Training Solutions. “Iowa’s low unemployment rate makes onboarding and getting the most from employees as soon as possible important.”

Training to comply with legal requirements and safety training rounded out the top five priorities.

Meanwhile, training technology and computer training both decreased.

ATW conducted the survey in partnership with New Horizons Computer Learning Centers, Central Iowa SHRM and the Central Iowa Chapter of the Association of Talent Development.

A majority of businesses (62.3 percent) said they plan to maintain the same talent development budget they had last year, while more than 36 percent plan to increase their budgets.

Those companies that keep spending the same or even decrease their talent budgets could see their training start to fall behind, McDonald said.

“It’s something companies will need to find a way to correct if they don’t want it to impact their overall success.” he said.

Top training topics in the 2016 survey include new employee orientation, coaching, leadership for emerging leaders, feedback from manager to employee, and accountability.

Companies plan to invest more time and money on training and talent development for managers and front-line employees, which is similar to the past two years.

For many companies, the largest portion of their talent development budgets, nearly half, will be used on the facilitation and delivery of courses. Another 15 percent will be used on custom content development for classroom instruction.

Respondents indicated that a majority of their out- sourced training budgets will be spent on the facilitation and delivery of courses (71.1 percent).

“It makes sense that organizations focus their internal expertise on organization-specific development efforts and use external resources to provide facilitation and delivery of ‘soft-skill’ courses, coaching or delivery,” McDonald said.

Find the full survey at www.atwtraining.com.