What is employee development?
Employee development is a cooperative effort between the company and the employee to improve the person’s current abilities and knowledge. To survive the severe competition, it is crucial for staff to be up to date with the latest advances in the sector. I assure you that if you are not aware of what is going on around you, you will lose the game before you even realize it.
Benefits of employee development
1. Defeat Stagnation
People are creatures of habit, and regardless of whether familiar patterns are good or bad, they frequently follow them. Offering staff training in new skills might shake things up and inspire them to think differently or develop new interests.
As your team brings new ideas to the table, combating employee stagnation may also combat corporate stagnation. Your business must always innovate and learn to remain competitive.
2. Find Fresh Talent (and Weaknesses)
It’s not always possible to find out about someone’s strengths and limitations before hiring them. There are occasions when you hire someone excellent at the job they were hired for but also possess additional skills that your team might find even more important.
This is why engaging closely with their staff on occasion is one of the most advantageous things a manager can do. Employees gain new abilities as a result, while managers gain a better understanding of the strengths and shortcomings of each employee.
When working in a developing company or sector, it is extremely crucial to have such a thorough awareness of your staff.
3. Keep Up Engagement
Employers face a serious dilemma because only 33% of the US workforce reported being engaged in their work. More engaged employees provide better work and can hasten a company’s progress. Offering professional development is one-way organizations can encourage employee engagement. Working with their peers fosters a sense of camaraderie and gives employees who are learning together the impression that they are moving forward in their careers. This is a fantastic method to increase engagement while imparting practical knowledge.
4. Obtain an Advantage
A crucial component of running a business is staying on top of market trends and monitoring your rivals. But how can you stay current if your staff is unaware of what’s going on in your sector? By ensuring that everyone has access to the most recent information in your sector, offering continual training and development gives your company a competitive edge.
5. Increased output and contentment
Employees will automatically become more productive and pleased with their work if they experience encouragement and inspiration at work. Employers may support their team while also witnessing greater productivity and happiness by providing continuing training that boosts employee ability and confidence.
Who knows—this raised level of satisfaction might even pique some workers’ interest in acquiring important leadership qualities like self-awareness, process management, and a desire to keep learning. This development will ultimately be advantageous for the person, their team, and the business as a whole. If you’re not proactively trying to help your staff and increase satisfaction, think about switching right away.
6. Talent Attraction and Retention
There are many job applicants, but it can be difficult to find the top ones. You must demonstrate to top talent your company’s commitment to employee development. Providing continuous training is one method to do this. Both potential employees and current employees will feel as though they are receiving more than simply a paycheck and will be more likely to stay so they can learn and grow.
Types of employee development
Orientation Training
Effective employee orientation training provides basic organizational information that new hires need to prepare for their role in a company. The orientation program benefits both employees and employers by educating new hires, setting them up for success in their new role, addressing any questions they may have, and helping them contribute to the organization right away.
Here are some key components of an employee orientation training program:
- Self-paced online learning programs for job-specific technical training.
- Online courses to explain the ins and outs of enterprise software.
- Information on safety procedures.
- Hands-on training on machines and equipment.
- In-person group training sessions for soft skills training like customer service, team-building, and client management.
- Formal courses through outside vendors on business and other topics.
Onboarding Training
Onboarding training is the process of getting your new hires up to speed, understanding their new responsibilities, getting familiar with company culture, and becoming productive team members quickly.
Employee orientation is a 1-2 days process whereas the employee onboarding process is a series of events that take place for a week, a month, or even a year in some cases. Onboarding is responsible for truly integrating an employee within an organization.
Some key components of employee onboarding include:
- Functional training to provide an overview of the organization’s products/services, clients/customers, and organizational structure.
- Online or instructor-led training to provide information on corporate information, sales, and business plans, goals, and objectives in the form of video onboarding
- Facilitated discussions between the new hire and managers to clarify expectations, priorities, and deliverables.
- Overview of company goals, organizational chart, and employee KPIs based on the job descriptions.
- Compliance information.
- A 30-60-90 day plan personalized to each employee according to their role, goals, and projects.
Compliance training
Compliance training is a workplace training type that is mandated by legislation, regulation, or policy. It educates employees on the laws and regulations applicable to their job function or industry.
An effective compliance training program helps prevent poor conduct and ensures proper governance in an organization. It helps minimize risks, maintains reputation, and provides a better and safe workplace environment for employees.
Product Training
Product training includes all the information about your organization’s goods, services, or products that employees need to learn to perform their jobs effectively.
Depending on different employee roles, product training can focus on different aspects and have different learning goals. Value-adding product training enables a marketing team to reach the right market, and a sales team to answer the critical questions customers are looking for.
Leadership training
Leadership training for your existing leaders is a way to refresh and reset their mindset. On the other hand, leadership training for other employees helps them better understand their current roles and learn what it takes to become exceptional leaders in the future.
Leadership development training programs have several important benefits such as:
- Increase employee morale and retention
- Promote better decision making
- Build better teams
- Improve leadership styles
Employee development methods
Learning period or learning period
Time off is among the most rewarding experiences you can provide for your staff. They can set aside a few hours each week to pick up new knowledge or develop useful skills during this time.
For instance, the 5-hour rule is adhered to by many people, including Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. Here, people set aside an hour each day (or five hours each week) to read or pick up new skills. This could involve learning a new operation or enhancing communication abilities.
If this approach inspires you, be sure to implement a structure that allows staff members to share their insights. We advise doing Slack check-ins every week or month so that staff members can inform management of their progress.
peer education
Peer learning
Connecting your employees with knowledgeable staff members within your organization is one of the finest methods to help them learn. By doing so, they will be able to learn directly from those who have already applied what they have learned to real-world situations. Simply dismantling silos and facilitating the training process is the challenge here.
Bring your marketing team leader in, for instance, to teach your sales team the fundamentals of content marketing. This will foster a collaborative work environment while also assisting your team in learning new things and improving their skills. Your staff will feel empowered and in charge of planning and directing employee development initiatives if you do it this way.
Communities of practice
This is an example of another great activity that doesn’t originate in the workplace. A community of practice or a COP is a group of people who share a common interest or a desire to pursue a mutual goal. This could be: trying to cut down a long sales cycle, improving their marketing content, organizing meetings in a more structured way – you name it.
Mentoring practices
Routines for mentorship are one-way streets, unlike peer learning. While mentorships are a supervised experience where senior staff members teach others the knowledge and skills needed to develop in their careers, peer learning involves employees learning from one another.
71% of Fortune 500 organizations use mentoring as a tool for staff development. This well-known staff development strategy can be applied in a variety of contexts. This initiative allows mentors and mentees to voluntarily engage based on their schedules and skill sets.
Even though mentoring is a one-sided activity, both the mentor and the mentee need to set up a timetable for their meetings, provide insightful criticism, plan meetings, and more. A well-known example of a business having an excellent mentorship program is General Electric. Various employees are connected with top-level executives to assist them in their education and leadership development.
Integrated onboarding
Whether your employees work primarily in the office, virtually, or a hybrid environment, onboarding is a critical phase in their personal growth. This is crucial in remote businesses because it could take many months for new hires to meet their coworkers. Because of this, onboarding is one of the key turning points in your employee’s career, and we’re here to help you every step of the way.
Check out how you can use our specialized onboarding programs to enthusiastically and sincerely greet your new hires. As a result, it makes sense to make the most of a hybrid workplace and get used to onboarding staff in this new environment. Software for onboarding new employees as the first step in employee development
Microlearning
Learning doesn’t always have to take days or hours. Bitesize exercises that may be finished in a few minutes or less are among the greatest teaching techniques. For instance, completing a task in a specific app, writing a text, examining a picture, and more.
One of the greatest corporations in the world, Walmart, has a fantastic microlearning program in place.
IBM, a major player in technology, offers yet another excellent example of microlearning. Many professionals needed to become familiar with a field that they were unaware of for their new project, IBM Cloud.
Of course, IBM being IBM, created its full-fledged platform called IBM Micro-Learning, where they presented short tasks for various positions, each of which aimed to teach a certain ability.