The Essential Employability Skills for Success“

Most employees in the Co-operative Food Store, especially those from disadvantaged and minority groups lack employability skills, which prevents them from further developing in their careers. However, training them on emotional intelligence, self-management skills and anxiety and energy management skills promotes their readiness for promotions and other career initiatives. Furthermore, the topics under the training program should encompass skills, values, and behavior, which are the major constituents of employability skills. Some of the areas under these constituents include; emotional intelligence, self-management skills, anxiety and energy management skills, communication, problem-solving, planning and organizing, technology, learning, teamwork, enterprise and initiative and social skills.

Introduction

Most reports from employers indicate that not all groups in the workplace have the same professionalism or academic skills, the competencies that constitute the building blocks that offers the foundation for success in the contemporary workforce. These foundational skills are not only critical for performance in a job, but also a necessary prerequisite for employees to start a career path. Employers claim that the foundational skills are as vital as the technical skills required during a job and their deficiency hampers workers’ ability and readiness to obtain, maintain or develop their career.

Background

Based on Co-operative Food Store case, most employees from disadvantaged and minority groups do not have the basic skills associated to work readiness, something that diminishes their chance to qualify for the management positions and other career advancement initiatives. Nonetheless, given that Co-operative Food Store is an equal opportunity employer, planning for a 6-month training of these employees is critical to building their employability skills so that they can apply for managerial positions or secure other career advancement training. To help Co-operative Food Store achieve one of its core values, this report offers a comprehensive analysis of the components of the training program for these groups and a recommendation of how training will be done and made productive.

Analysis

Training Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability of an individual to keep their own emotions and those of others in control, discriminate between particular emotions and use emotions as a guide to right behavior and thinking (Cherniss & Goleman, 2001). Training of staff to enhance the understanding and recognition of own emotions helps in understanding those of others. Also, emotional intelligence is the foundation of empathy, self-motivation, and social skills, all that are critical attributes for managers, leaders and employees aspiring to grow their career pathways. Furthermore, it is not adequate to be well-read, knowledgeable, intelligent and smart without emotional intelligence. Deficits in emotional intelligence results to disagreements, embarrassment, disappointments, and conflicts of interests amongst employers and employees, damaging the progress of an organization (Cherniss & Goleman, 2001). If a manager or leader cannot meet workers where they are, it is difficult to raise them to the levels desired. The fortunate thing is that everybody can enhance their emotional intelligence through training. It means that whereas some workers are naturally intelligent, others can be trained to build better emotional intelligence to enhance their employability skills. Due to the significance of having employability skills, training in emotional intelligence for Co-operative Food Store employees should be done such that it is productive, impactful and effective.

Training Self-management skills

Initially, self-management was developed and applied by the clinical psychologists. The underpinning premise of self-management is that a person desiring a change is more likely to attain this change if they take control of their change process (Yuki, 2012). Therefore, instead of psychologists using behavioral principles in bringing about change, a person is trained in self-management principles and how they should apply them on their own. Hence, Co-operative’s staff taking charge of their own change program would make them feel the drive to develop their career, readiness to take any task, efficacious and this change is often long-lasting than when helped by someone else. Subsequently, training an individual to self-manage enhances their emotional competencies such as self-confidence, accurate self-assessment, self-control, reliability, conscientiousness, and achievement drive.

Training Anxiety and Energy Management Skills

The knowhow or skill on how to manage anxiety and energy is very pivotal in managers and leaders (Loeh & Schwartz, 2003). Whereas anxiety management refers to controlling normal reaction to a perceived threat, which triggers various physical, behavioral and mental changes, energy management refers to a complex mental strength skill, which entails the ability of an individual to relax when feeling too nervous or activated when lethargic or flat. For effective management of anxiety and energy, training on these skills is critical so that staff are able to both boost and reduce their physical and mental energies. These energies include; rapid breathing, increased heart rate, tiredness, lethargic worry, pre-race thoughts, negativity, and too little mental energy such as unmotivated, mentally flat etc. Therefore, training on this skill would render Co-operative’s staff active and productive while ensuring that they become prepared for promotions and responsibilities.

Recommendations

The objective of the training program should be to enhance Co-operative’s staff employability skills to prepare them for management roles and other career advancement initiatives. The program should be conducted 5 hours (9 am to 3 pm with 1 pm being lunch break) daily for three days of the week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) and the total duration of training should be 6 months. Main topics to be covered during this program constitute on means of developing work readiness skills through; emotional intelligence, self-management skills, anxiety and energy management skills, communication, problem-solving, planning and organizing, technology, learning, teamwork, enterprise and initiative, social skills etc. These topics embody three main areas fundamental for employability skills: values, behaviors, and skills. The training program will be divided into three stages, each taking a considerable number of topics as outlined below.

Stage

Topics to be covered

Duration

Stage 1 (Skills)

Emotional intelligence

Self-management

Anxiety and energy management

Communication, work ethics and teamwork,

Technical skills

Business literacy

Technology

3 Months

Stage 2 (Behavior)

Adaptability

Authenticity

Business-mindedness

Collaboration

Customer-focused

Globally Aware

Self-aware

Resilient

Flexibility

2 Months

Stage 3 (Values)

Continuous improvement

Accountability

Knowledge

Respect

Tolerance

Work Ethics

Honesty

1 Month

In his article, Sung (2013, p. 179) asserts that employability skills or readiness to work encompass three main areas; values, behavior, and skills. Thus, Co-operative-based trainers should capitalize in the three areas for maximum outcomes from the training program. Besides enhancing staff’s readiness to work, training in these areas will increase their competency and hence improved performance of the Store.  Accordingly, basing the first training on core skills would allow trainers to use readily accessible units from existing company’s skills training packages used when the Store was established (Tims, et al., 2012, p. 175).

The training program will help employees ready for work at Co-operative in several ways. The first stage of the training centers on developing skills and as Harrison (2011) claim workers’ skills are the foundation of better performance in an organization. A staff with a good grasp of employability skills is pivotal due to the industries that are intensely competitive and thus having them in Co-operative would mean a positive growth for the company. Thus, equipping Co-operative staff with better skills, values, and behavior will enhance not only performance within the organization, but will promote a positive reputation and image of the company outside. This will, in turn, improve loyalty to the company and hence more profits.

The delivery of the training will be done through groups, where the trainer will group the staff members into 3 groups each expected to perform better than the other at the end of the training. Closing the exercises will entail giving comments in groups, asking questions to these groups and leaving them to answer by themselves. The final activity of each day will constitute an evaluation that will determine the quality of what has been delivered to different groups in a day and whether it was effective. According to Nadler and Zeace (2012), evaluation of a training program permits the correction of the content of the session and establishment of the extent of particular objectives and if they were met.

Conclusion

Whereas work readiness skills continue to be a probing issue in many organizations, training has been shown to contribute to better employability skills, giving a chance for workers to develop their careers and get promotions. Nonetheless, the topics or objectives of the training programs must fit with solutions to initial problems. Also, the training program must be conducted such that it will have maximum outcomes while at the same time ensuring that continuity of operations within the organization are not tampered with.

References

Cherniss, C. & Goleman, D., 2001. The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Harrison, R., 2011. Learning and development.Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal, 26(1).

Loeh, J. & Schwartz, T., 2003. The Power of full engagement. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Nadler, Z. and Nadler, L., 2012. Designing training programs. Routledge.

Sung, J., Ng, M.C.M., Loke, F. and Ramos, C., 2013. The nature of employability skills: empirical evidence from Singapore. International Journal of Training and Development, 17(3), pp.176-193.

Tims, M., Bakker, A.B. and Derks, D., 2012. Development and validation of the job crafting scale. Journal of vocational behavior, 80(1), pp.173-186.

Yuki, G., 2012. Leadership in Organizations 8th Edition. Essex: Pearson.