What’s in a training and development specialist job description? The general answer to that question should be fairly obvious from the title of the position. As a training and development specialist, you would be helping to develop solutions to institutional problems and inefficiencies by focusing on the proper training of personnel.
The more particular answer to the question may vary depending on the hirer, as well as the ever-changing needs of individual companies and entire industries. The training you provide could be focused on individual departments and types of employees, or it could be company-wide. And you may function as a training and development specialist either within the human resources department of the company you serve, or else as an independent contractor running external classes and workshops.
Naturally, a training and development specialist might provide different kinds of training, usually because of his or her own specialization but also because a stakeholder has newly become aware of serious issues that need to be addressed by way of personnel training. By monitoring industry news, you might be able to get a sense of which areas a training and development specialist might need to focus on in the near future. And this could in turn help you to determine what specific topics you should focus on as you pursue information technology training, business analyst training, and ultimately a career as a training and development specialist.
As you may already suspect, one area of special concern in the current business environment is cybersecurity training. A recent article at IT Pro Portal notes that in the United Kingdom, the cost of cybersecurity breaches has risen by 19 percent over the previous year. Unsurprisingly, this means that companies are investing more in addressing weaknesses. And while some of this investment is focused on technological improvements, much of it also finances the work of a training and development specialist with the unique skills to improve staff responses to security vulnerabilities.
The same article indicates that a survey has found 55 percent of UK employees to have no recollection of having received cybersecurity training. This represents a highly significant and potentially costly oversight by many otherwise successful firms. And it is an oversight that you, as a training and development specialist, can exploit to improve your career prospects.
Naturally, there are other trends and deficiencies that you might focus on to carve an alternative niche for yourself as a training and development specialist. These include, for instance, the widespread adoption of certified scrum master training, both within the information technology industry and throughout much of the workforce. What’s more, additional such trends may very well develop in the near future.
It is advisable to keep yourself abreast of industry-specific news. And to the fullest extent possible, we will try to do it for you. But while you’re looking for the next big thing, the overall importance of the training and development specialist job description goes to show that a broad foundation of information technology training will set you up for a wide range of opportunities in the knowledge focused workforce of the near future.