The study was conducted through a survey of findcourses.co.uk users and discovered that 48% of respondents believe the best way to prove their skills and become indispensable to their employing organisation is to partake in a training programme in order to develop specialised skills. Nearly 24% of users felt as though working overtime or being innovative would accomplish the same outcome, while a combined 28% felt as though they were already indispensable or were powerless when proving their indispensability.
These findings are of important significance as UK unemployment figures have reached their highest since 1994 (according to the office of National Statistics. The results of this survey indicate that is it more important than ever for employees to prove their worth to their respective organisations. The Chief Economic Advisor from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) stated, “These pre-festive-season jobs figures are so bad even Santa’s elves will be feeling insecure. The quarterly rise of 128,000 in unemployment is itself enough to dampen the spirits but what’s worse is news that private sector job figures were falling at twice the rate as had initially been expected.”
The same study was conducted in Finland, Denmark, Germany and Sweden and yielded nearly 350 responses. German users exhibited the highest number of respondents (32%) feeling powerless when it came to proving their worth to their employers. Swedish and Danish users displayed similar responses with 48% of uses from both countries maintaining that professional training was the key to proving their indispensability. Finnish users were the most divided; exhibiting no clear pattern between what is the largest contributor to proving indispensability. However, Sweden and Finland had the least number of respondents believing that working overtime was the best way to prove their worth to the company.
“It is clearly becoming more important than ever for employees to prove their indispensability,” said Kate Butterworth Site Manager at findcourses.co.uk. “In the midst of a recession, employers become increasingly likely to cut back and refrain from hiring, which perpetuates unemployment and escalates the need to develop new skills through professional development training.”
Findcourses.co.uk is the UK’s largest search engine dedicated to Professional Development – search, find and compare thousands of training courses in the UK. Findcourses.co.uk partnered with The Independent to power The Independent’s Training & Courses Site – providing a search service to hundreds of thousands of users every month.
