Training is essential to employee development and happiness. Employees want a feeling of progression in the workplace and want to feel that every day is contributing toward a career, training employees even in immediately irrelevant skills that they perceive to be relevant can improve their confidence and work ethic enough to justify the training. Simply rotating employee duties in a stale office environment (on a quarterly basis) can also increase morale and increase the skill sets for each employee, this can give you a fully multi-tasked office that is better equipped to deal with absenteeism.
Legitimate qualifications improve employee confidence and given the current unemployment rates it helps to make them feel safe, that they can dedicate their time to your company and have some skill sets to fall back on when redundancy comes a knockin'. Illegitimate qualifications have the opposite affect, people are demotivated by being forced to earn something worthless or even worse - they are motivated but then go to apply for a vacancy that uses that skill and find that it is not recognised as the industry standard.
Re-training is a complete minefield, employees hate being trained on something they already know and quickly become fraustrated or offended that they were chosen for the retraining course.
Legitimate qualifications improve employee confidence and given the current unemployment rates it helps to make them feel safe, that they can dedicate their time to your company and have some skill sets to fall back on when redundancy comes a knockin'. Illegitimate qualifications have the opposite affect, people are demotivated by being forced to earn something worthless or even worse - they are motivated but then go to apply for a vacancy that uses that skill and find that it is not recognised as the industry standard.
Re-training is a complete minefield, employees hate being trained on something they already know and quickly become fraustrated or offended that they were chosen for the retraining course.