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Evaluate your current skills in relation to operating your business. Running a skills audit at the same time as developing your business plan will put you in a better position to understand any skills areas that need building or improvement.

As well as industry-specific skills and knowledge, the following skills are important to develop:

• finance
• marketing
• administration
• personnel management
• sales
• communications
• website management

Are you and your staff up-to-date in these areas? A sole trader needs to be multi-skilled or use outside professionals, however a business owner with staff can make sure they hire people with complementary skills to their own.

Identifying skills gaps in your business

Once you have identified the particular talents of your current staff (and determined how they can be put to best use in the company) and developed their existing skills in-house as much as possible, you need to determine what gaps still remain and the best way to cover them.

Before you find a trainer or course, you need to: 

• review your business goals and the skills needed to meet them
• decide whether the business plan is still applicable or whether you have changed your products, your business process, or the size or complexity of your organisation which necessitates extra skills
• consider seeking professional advice to investigate which areas in your business need improvement

What type of training?

The term training can mean anything from courses in business procedures and management to vocational education and training (VET) options.

The type of training you choose will depend on your answers to the training-needs analysis above, or the advice of a professional training-needs assessor who will identify the skills you require. In many instances you may need to recruit new employees, send staff on short or long courses, provide a trainer, or attend industry seminars and conventions.

But it's also worth returning to your staff to see if there is still even more untapped potential. An existing skills base could be creatively redeployed to cover one or more of your identified gaps.

When deciding on what type of training you need to:

• identify the type of training likely to deliver the best result (e.g. in-house, short course, professional degree, online tutorial)
• choose who in your organisation you want to train, and if it's possible or desirable that they then train others in the company
• develop a training schedule
• develop a work plan to cover the shortfall in resources while training is taking place.