News & Insights

Staff Training and Support

Jack Bolton
Written by
Jack Bolton
Staff Training and Support (2)

When tendering for public contracts, it is more than likely that you will be asked to explain your organisation’s staff training process. You are also likely to be asked how you support and monitor staff in developing their skills.

This level of concern and interest in your staff’s career development may surprise you. These are fairly common questions however as the buying organisation looks to assure themselves that your staff are capable of delivering the required services.

Training Process

Training Process (1)

When asked about your processes for staff training, you should try to be as detailed, specific and relevant as possible. If your company provides home care services for example, you should talk about safe handling, promoting dignity and hygiene training. If you’re in construction, explain training such as health and safety, equipment maintenance and so on.

One of the best ways to illustrate all the areas your training covers is to break it down into smaller ‘modules’. For example, a care company might provide training in the following ‘modules’:

  • Health and Safety
  • Dignity and Respect
  • Hygiene and Cleanliness
  • Safeguarding etc.

While in reality these ‘modules’ may be part of the same training session, it is better to divide them. Not only does this emphasise specifics of your training, but also enhances the apparent depth and professionalism of your agenda.

Your response should also distinguish between induction training, when an employee first joins your company and ongoing development or specialisation training that should relate to trickier or more niche areas of the contract being tendered for.

Supporting Staff Development and Monitoring

Supporting Staff Development and Monitoring

Questions surrounding your training procedures are often accompanied or linked with questions about your staff support and progress monitoring. This should be unsurprising as it is important to ascertain whether staff are properly applying what they have been taught.

While your responses should be tailored to your specific industry, there are also a few general methods for supporting staff development. These include:

  • Providing ongoing training sessions and the opportunity to specialise or gain qualifications and certifications.
  • Providing incentives for meeting or exceeding targets. These could include awards, promotions, bonuses or employee days away.
  • Organising regular staff performance reviews and appraisals. This allows you to provide pointers for staff on how to improve their performance. Appraisals also enable you to collect feedback on how staff feel they are supported.
  • Drawing up staff development plans. Working with your staff to agree upon attainable targets and KPIs for the next year.

Similarly, there are some standard ways of monitoring your staff to ensure they are doing their jobs properly. These include:

  • Scheduled Supervision.
  • Spot-Checks.
  • Post-Observation Reviews.

Difficulties

Difficulties

Answering this question may be particularly difficult for smaller companies as procedures can often be more informal in comparison to larger companies. However, it is important that you still portray them professionally, even if only for the purposes of the tender.

As with your answers to training questions, your response to a development and monitoring question should be as industry-specific as possible. While methods of supporting staff development may be similar across industries, details may not. You therefore need to include these in your answer.

In construction for example, workers who make serious mistakes on site may face suspension pending retraining. Care workers implicated in safeguarding incidents on the other hand may also face suspension or even dismissal.

Conclusion

A question regarding training and staff development may appear daunting. In reality it’s a simple case of describing clearly what you already do. Every job will require some level of training and all staff will be provided with some modicum of support, even if you don’t realise you are doing it.

If you are still struggling to put pen to paper (or more likely fingers to keys), there are professional bid consultants who can help. Give us a call!

 

Did you enjoy this post?

Check out one of our latest blogs: Environmental Policies – Why They’re so Important.

Follow us on Linkedin to keep up with our day-to-day operations. We post new tenders, weekly blogs, tips, tricks and more.

Contact us

Talk to an expert

We will provide a free, no obligation consultation on your bidding requirements

Contact