Developing your best and brightest; it's a fact: investing in your staff's professional development pays solid dividends in terms of increased productivity and loyalty.

Being a small or even mid-sized employer in the land of automotive giants is not always easy. The "Big Three" dominate the employment landscape, often making it difficult to attract and keep the best employees.

Here's one key solution--focus hard on developing the employees you already have. This not only reduces recruiting expenses and headaches, it also pays solid dividends in terms of increased productivity and loyalty. And it needn't be expensive.

Most executives manage three things--time, capital and people. Businesses readily invest capital in new technology, equipment or processes to become more productive and competitive.

When it comes to investing in people, the focus tends to be on such tangible items as compensation and benefits. Too often, we ignore other rewards that employees value highly and cost comparatively little, especially training and career development.

Here's what you need to do to assess your professional development needs:

1. Define the services or products that are absolutely essential to your business--not the "nice" things, the necessary things. These are your core competencies--the knowledge, skills and abilities that you require from your employees.

2. Define your company culture, values and mission. Ask yourself, "How do I want my employees to behave--toward customers, each other and vendors?"

3. Determine what skill sets your employees are lacking--communication, time-management, resource allocation, etc. Let your employees self-evaluate their knowledge, skills and abilities to pinpoint their own training needs.

4. Focus on fixing only a few key items. For example, you may find that most employees identify supervision, sales presentations and managing change as deficiencies. These areas become your first development priorities.

5. Identify and provide development resources. Options include using internal subject matter experts or your own human resources people as trainers. If you don't have a professional HR staff, seminars or contracted on-site trainers are excellent alternatives.

6. Evaluate your training sessions. Let employees rate subject matter, materials and the trainer so that improvements can be made.

7. Consider offering financial assistance for employees to attend college and/or trade schools to sharpen work-related skills. Employees highly value this benefit, and it pays for itself quickly.

During tough times, training and development actually should be increased

Successful companies invest in the development of their employees no matter what. Research consistently demonstrates that employees value and choose to stay with employers that provide training and career development opportunities.

During tough times, training and development actually should be increased. It is then that companies most need to become more efficient, with improved customer service, shorter supply chains and increased productivity that drive profits to the bottom line.

A 5-step mini-guide for getting started

1. Develop job descriptions and organization charts. They're essential in determining who and what needs to be developed.

2. Share with employees the career paths available to them, and the knowledge, skills and abilities they need to advance.

3. Promote from within and let employees know what you've done. Celebrate success by showing them another of their peers who has "made it."

4. Develop employees cross-functionally. Move employees laterally from one area to another in order for them to learn all aspects of the business. This will quickly improve their individual skills while increasing productivity.

5. Use mentoring Pair veterans with less-seasoned employees. Teach them by coaching to enhance personal, professional and career development

Source: Handleman Co.

How much to spend?--There is no magic formula for developing a solid training and development program, It all depends on your business's needs and those of the marketplace. Start with a figure you think is affordable--one-half of one percent of sales, for example--and measure the results after a year.

Where can I find help?--Companies that specialize in training and career development are plentiful. Two excellent organizations to start your search are the Society for Human Resource Management at www.shrm.org and the American Society for Training & Development at www.astd.org.

Mark Albrecht is senior vice president of human resources and organizational development at Handleman Co. in Troy, a member of the Detroit Regional Chamber.

10 tips for training on a fight budget

When faced with a tight budget, there are a number of inexpensive ways to boost training effectiveness:

1. Take advantage of local colleges to the fullest. Many now offer instructional design services, multimedia production and online learning at reasonable rates.

2. Hire independent local consultants, coaches and trainers, instead of expensive, big-name consulting firms.

3. Learn more about instructional design so you can create, streamline or customize programs that consistently meet your needs and minimize costs.

4. Develop lessons-learned information and put it online for easy access. Do the same for standard operating procedures and other "how-to" content. This can aid in the successful transfer of existing training and, in some cases, replace it.

5. Base training on your strategic plan. Set training priorities in accordance with it, and focus on those people whose performance is most crucial to your company's success.

6. Offer an expanded internal support system with greater mentoring, coaching and e-learning to enhance and accelerate in-house learning opportunities.

7. Search, find and apply for state grants even if you work for a profit organization.

8. Stimulate innovation. Set outrageous performance "goals" and let employees brainstorm faster, better and/or cheaper ways to train to attain them.

9. Use your network of learning and development associates and the Internet to keep up with new training technologies and programs. Today's tighter budgets are prompting more creative solutions than ever.

10. Always determine whether training is the most appropriate intervention for a given target audience. Ask, "If their lives depended on it, could they perform properly?" If so, you do not have a training problem.

Source: Learning and development consultant Frank J. Troha, Ph.D.