Sharpen your saw: continuing education offers a competitive edge.

• Author: Wilhite, Brent
• Position: Small Business Advisor

You won't read it on a label, a cereal box, or in a health magazine, but doctors agree--stagnancy will kill you. Okay, it won't really kill you, but it can kill your business.

"Right now, knowledge is the key source of competitive advantage," says Dr. Vicki Whiting, assistant professor of management at Westminster College. "If you're not keeping up on the current trends, you'll lose your competitive advantage, because someone else will figure out how to get into that market, or how to serve your market better, and people won't come to you. Stagnancy will kill you."

Some industries are compelled to keep with the changing times. For example, a bank that can't keep its employees current on the latest federal regulations and compliance issues will soon find itself lagging behind competitors and could be headed for costly legal trouble.

"We set some goals and made it a point to send all of our officers to at least one training session a year," says Jim Smith, president and CEO of Layton's America West Bank. "That can be expensive," he admits, "but there is a tremendous price to pay if our employees aren't properly trained."

Professional training plays an integral role in Smith's banking operations. His staff receives instruction on new products, and he sends his commercial loan officers to training: "I even send our board of directors to specific board-of-director training for bankers," he adds.

Shipping employees off to training so often can be costly; however, Smith found substantial savings by eliminating travel costs. "If I can find a national seminar that is being offered in Salt Lake City, then I don't have to pay airfare and hotel expenses," he notes. "I don't have to compound the training costs with extra expenses.

While the national training seminars can offer a wealth of information, they aren't for everyone. Brett Gee, president and owner of FORTHGEAR, a visual communications and branding firm, has altered his approach to training based on experience. "In the past, we have sent our corporate executives to large national seminars and symposiums for a variety of educational exposure," he says. "However, we found that the formats were often too broad and generic. We left spending a great deal of money with very little applicable information."

Whether these training sessions are offered locally or out of state, they still don't rank high on the convenience, scale. In order to make training easier for employees to swallow, many companies...