READ TIME – 3 MINUTES

The cost of living crisis has unfortunately affected both individuals and businesses alike. Instability and uncertainty can affect smaller businesses more than larger corporations, especially when it comes to changes in the financial climate.

Whatever 2023 may bring, your business needs to be ready. You can’t predict political or economic changes in the UK or globally, but you can future-proof your business in a number of crucial ways.

How?

Invest in your people… It’s the most important way you can insulate and strengthen your company is by investing in your people. Are you worried about skills gaps, or being able to adapt to change? Start a new strategic, proactive approach right now, making developing people a clear priority from 2023 onwards.

And you don’t have to do it alone. Training and people development specialists such as AvA-V can help you to define a strategy for 2023. You’ll be able to focus on achieving your goals, whether it’s creating a pipeline of talent for the next 12 months or preparing for a digital transformation so you can move into new markets.

1. Identify and Invest in Your People Now

Your leaders will be crucial in 2023, as they’ll be on the front line if your business faces new challenges. How they react to change will ripple across the organisation, so you need innovative, cool-headed and dynamic leaders in place.

Take the time to identify your leaders and their strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for development. AvA-V’s leadership and coaching programme can help you develop inspirational leaders, so you’ll be prepared for anything.

2. Spot Skills Gaps Before they Become a Major Issue

You can’t necessarily predict a sudden skills gap; Especially one that comes about as a result of financial or political uncertainty, but you can assess your current capability. Looking ahead to the next 12 months, you need to identify areas of weakness. From this, you can develop a clear training or recruitment strategy to address it. You can even look further ahead, to the next generation of talent; You can look at how you’ll be able to attract the people you need and how to train them.

Invest in your people

3. Upskill your team

With a broader skill set, your team is better equipped to respond to change. But investing in training has many other benefits too. It boosts staff morale, productivity and retention, and makes you more attractive as a company to new hires – a huge 91% of Generation Z workers look for professional training opportunities when choosing an employer.

4. Link Your Training Strategy with Clear Business Goals

Before you start investing in learning and development for the coming year, you need to define your overall goals as a business for 2023. What challenges will you face, and how will you overcome them? This is where it becomes invaluable to have a bespoke strategy in place for training and recruitment.

5. Focus on Sales

If you’re worried about a downturn in customers and sales in 2023, investing in your sales team could be smart. Professional sales training can help you build a more efficient pipeline, deliver a higher standard of service, nurture more leads and crucially – close more deals. It could make a huge difference to your bottom line in 2023.

Why Should You Invest In your People

6. Offer Virtual Classroom Training

One effective method to train employees and upskill teams that have been growing in popularity in recent years and is a trend that looks set to continue into 2023, is virtual classroom training. Rather than having to physically be in a classroom, offering training through virtual, remote classroom settings, comes with a number of benefits for both employers and employees. The benefits of virtual classroom training include:

  • Flexible scheduling
  • Increased convenience
  • Time-saving
  • Higher levels of participation and engagement
  • Better knowledge retention
  • Quicker feedback