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Each organisation has their own goals and you’ll have strategies and action plans in place to help you reach those goals. Training your staff through Careerforce may be one of those actions and we’re proud to be working in partnership with you to help you reach your goals.

It’s important that you work with your staff to help them develop training goals.  Setting training and professional development goals are important to retain high-performing staff and keep them engaged. Setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time bound) for your staff doing training will help them:

  • clarify their ideas,
  • focus their efforts,
  • keep them motivated, and
  • use and manage their time well to achieve their qualification.

While for you as the employer, having set goals with your staff:

  • allow you to track their progress,
  • provide you an insight on what they already know
  • gives you the opportunity to plan any support, backfill, and study days required.

Setting achievable and realistic goals

Pam Harris, our Careerforce Workplace Advisor for Canterbury, was the Learning and Development Manager at Nurse Maude. She shares her experience on how she used to support staff at Nurse Maude with setting their goals.

“Goal setting is absolutely critical. In my previous role at Nurse Maude, we require all our 400 support workers to have at least a Level 2 health and wellbeing qualification.”

“When we have new staff starting training, we would talk to them about how long the qualification is going to take, how much time in the week they need to dedicate to do it. We then ask and agree on how many unit standards they think they can achieve in the first month or two. Most of them will get through the qualification in the six-month period.”

“For those who wanted to progress to complete the Level 3 health and wellbeing qualification, and with the support of their manager, we would encourage them to complete 1 unit standard every 4 weeks. In a year they would have completed.”

“And then to train at Level 4, this actually would have been a goal set through their performance appraisal. We would support them to complete as well but highlight that this is more advanced and would require more time.”

Pam said that making achievable and realistic goals like having agreed number of unit standards achieved in a given period helps keep staff motivated.

“Just give them short, small targets to start off with until they feel confident.”

But equally important she said is that trainees should know that they are supported by their colleagues, managers and the whole organisation.

 

Using the Careerforce reports to track progress

Pam suggests that employers keep track of their trainees’ progress towards their goals.

“There is a bit of effort into ensuring that trainees are tracking well towards their goal. One of the really key things is that first period when they sign up. The main time you tend to lose people is when they first start. They can come into you, do their induction, and then they’re off doing their jobs in the community. They’re busy. That’s the time they need that additional support put in place.”

Pam used the monthly reports from Careerforce, especially the ‘under 10 credit report’ to track their progress.

Pam said, “I’ll use that and speak to the person and say, ‘you know it’s been a month gone, we’ve noticed you haven’t started, is this something we can help you with?’ That way, we were able to pick most people up. A reason could just be that they haven’t done anything online before and just weren’t sure how to get started.”

Now that Pam is ‘on the other side of the fence,’ she still uses this report to support the employers who may have staff struggling.

‘The reports are massively helpful. For me, my goal now coming into my Careerforce Workplace Advisor role is to see no ‘under 10 credit report’ at all for my employers,” said Pam.