Investing in employee development is important for you as a business owner because it helps you attract the best talent in the industry. Employees are drawn to companies that offer them employee development as part of the hiring package. Besides, it gives your organization a competitive advantage over other similar organizations or job openings.
Obviously, training your employees allows them to have the necessary tools to do their jobs. However, there is more to it. According to a research journal published by the Journal of Business and Management Sciences, employee development training improves the overall climate for employment. In the process, it creates positive relationships, attitudes, and behaviors, increasing employee loyalty.
What Is the Difference Between Employee Development and Employee Training ?
As mentioned above, employee training utilizes several programs to enable an employee to develop the necessary skills, practices, and competencies to help them do their job. Employee development, on the other hand, comprises of both professional, physical, and emotional schooling to holistically develop an employee and resume services near me can help you with this.
What does this mean? Well, first, you need to focus on both aspects to bring the very best out of your employees. They are not machines which you can train to perform certain functions. They are people with emotional physical and intellectual needs. David Hassell, a business columnist, and entrepreneur believes that for your training program to be effective, it needs to take account of all these variables.
Here are the main tips to implement a successful employee training and development program:
1. Remember to Emphasize Soft Skills
Soft skills simply refer to the interpersonal attributes that employees need to succeed in their line of work. There are seven universally accepted soft skills;
- Leadership skills
- Interpersonal skills
- Flexibility and Adaptability
- Communication skills
- Teamwork
- Work Ethic
- Problem Solving
The workforce industry is changing to accommodate individuals who possess such skills. So, why not equip your employees with these in-demand skills. Industry expert Josh Bersin believes that such skills take a long time to learn. Additionally, he believes that they are always changing to meet market demands.
Keep in mind that business organizations are made up of different people with different believes from different locations. For the business to function as a cohesive unit, you need to consider training your employees on these interpersonal skills.
2. Analyze Your Competition
At the end of the day, you are training and developing your employees to have a competitive advantage over your business competitors. Before settling for a particular program, consider analyzing what your competition or industry leaders are doing. Cross-reference this information with what you are aiming to do in training, to see whether it’s actually better than the competition.
You can start by looking up various training models. Alternatively, consider networking with professionals in organizations like the Society for Human Resource Management, to find out what is going on.
Alternatively, consider using social media avenues such as Twitter and Facebook to find out what the market is saying about the competition. Additionally, there are numerous consider using online surveys to help you gather the necessary information.
3. Track the progress of employee development
When you implement a new training and development program, you expect to see a positive change to the overall performance, employee retention rates, job satisfaction, and brand improvement. Rightly so, there are just too many learning programs out there that are certainly not worthwhile. And with high stakes involved, this is one area that you shouldn’t take unnecessary risks.
Many generic training programs are not worthwhile. For one reason or the other, they are just not optimized for growth and development of skills. The last thing that you’d want it to do as a business owner or manager is to invest resources in a failing course.
Tracking employee progress in training is the only way to ensure that you make the necessary changes to a program before it’s too late. But how do you do it?
First, consider using employee performance tools or simplified ways to manage a recurring workforce for your team. These tools will help you gather data to see which task force is growing and which one is not. From this information, it is possible to make informed decisions concerning the development of learning programs.
4. Using Real Life Experiences for Employees to Relate.
Learning and development are aspects that are often delivered with rigidity to textbook principles and concepts. However, according to professional life coach and trainer Michael Arnold, life stories and examples have a positive effect on people’s learning abilities. He suggests that training programs should be optimized to include specific stories on how to use the skills and information acquired from learning programs in their day to day job activities.
People tend to relate to stories from people who have had actual situations as opposed. For instance, most religious stories from most religions have different stories that carry different messages for people to learn. In the same way, your training program should incorporate different stories for your workforce to relate to. Besides, such stories break the monotony of constant textbook learning.
5. Remember to Make It Engaging and Fun.
As much as training and development programs are supposed to be taken seriously, they can be monotonous or ‘boring’ from time to time. According to Brandon Schroth, a digital manager at Gillware, the best way to ensure that your workforce remains motivated and incentivized to learn, you should consider having fun training sessions.
Conclusion
Such activities do not necessarily have to be during the training hours, but after. For instance, you could reward employees who have shown significant levels of progress by buying them lunch or giving them a gift voucher. We hope that these ideas will be helpful for you and your employees.
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Author
Laura Garbers is a Career Coaching Expert with experience in interviewing individuals in online, group, and “one-on-one” sessions to help them reach their education or career potential. She’s a career coach and professional career advisor at CraftResumes.
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Note: This is a sponsored article!