By Tennille Bell, General Manager Sales at Programmed Process Outsourcing (PPO)

Skills development and resource efficiency go hand-in-hand toward achieving business success. The aim is to provide all workers with the opportunity for personal career growth by ensuring they’re up to date on the latest industry developments as well as how to use the newest technology. In addition to enabling businesses to streamline operations by outsourcing essential non-core business functions and optimising core processes, companies can also outsource the skills development of their own people to BPO providers for maximum efficiency. Furthermore, BPO providers can offer the young job-seeking market a significant springboard for gaining vital workplace experience and skills development, playing an important role in uplifting the South African workforce.  

Positive ripple effect

Skills development in the workplace has a direct effect on business success, leading to measurable results and an impact on overall efficiency, ultimately improving the bottom line of the business. By continuously improving the fundamental business drivers, the link between skills and success becomes more apparent. Helping workers, for example, to improve their communications skills leads to enhanced teamwork and improved customer service, while increased technical skills raises accuracy and quality of performance, as a result of workers who are more knowledgeable, better motivated and more engaged. This in turn leads to increased productivity and better output, has a positive effect on retention, and proves that skills development is so much more than just training. It showcases a positive ripple effect on everything and everyone in the business. 

Keep up with the pace of change

Technology and the workplace are constantly evolving, which means yesterday’s skills will not be relevant tomorrow. To remain relevant, businesses must keep up with the times and ensure their skills are always on point, which requires continuous development. However, this is not something that companies need to handle alone. Skills development is an ideal business function for outsourcing and a BPO provider that has a particular focus on human resource development can be instrumental in achieving operational efficiency.

Here, employees can learn fundamental skills like conflict management, diversity management and benefit from team-building courses as well as indispensable skills such as stress and time management. When individuals understand how to utilise these effectively, these enhanced workplace abilities lead to increased operational efficiencies. BPO providers can offer these universal skills development programmes, as well as job-specific skills training opportunities. Here, the BPO provider will facilitate a skills development programme tailored to a particular work environment, considering the skills and personality traits necessary to function and perform well in that environment. 

Outsourcing skills development 

In handling a company’s skills development strategy, a BPO provider takes care of more than just staff training, they also take responsibility for the measurement, productivity and efficiency of those human resources. This is done through regular performance appraisals that identify improvement areas for individuals, providing the foundation for an ongoing collaborative development programme to upskill abilities within the various KPIs that workers perform. This provides a controlled, supportive context within which individuals develop skills through continuous assessment and development, 

From efficiency to success

A BPO provider will evaluate a company’s processes for inefficiencies, make the changes necessary to attain efficiencies, and then provide the skills development to gain those efficiencies. This is aimed not only at improving productivity, but also to bring companies more in line with their compliance and legal requirements, identifying needs and grey areas for further development and improvement. This culminates in a continuous cycle of auditing, identifying, training, measurement and improvement of both people and processes, bringing together all the necessary ingredients for business success.