How To Keep Your Top Performers Instead Of Scaring Them Away
A lot of factors come into play for you to love your job. Beyond a prestigious title, a nice desk and an impressive salary there also needs to be an element of fun. You need to feel you’re making a difference, both to the world and yourself. And you need to feel like you’re growing. Naturally, your juniors have the same set of career requirements. And workforce development training is a great way to meet these professional demands. But online training is often filled with errors. Let’s look at some of the most common online training mistakes that are costing you your top talent.
6 Workforce Development Online Training Pitfalls To Avoid
1. Inadequate Jit Resources
Pedantic bosses are all about structures and procedures. They bristle at the very concept of ‘shortcuts’. But sometimes that’s exactly what you need. A staffer might be shopping with their family on the weekend when they bump into a potential client. They have a few minutes to engage them and capture that lead. They don’t have time for a half-hour small-talk tutorial. But they could take a glance at an infographic of conversations starters. Or some tips and tricks on gracefully transitioning from "weather and kids" to talking shop. If you don’t have these emergency training props in your place, your staff will feel unsupported. And their CVs may start to stray away.
2. Evading Personalized Paths
‘There’s only one you. You’re special and unique, just like everyone else.’ We all want to believe in our individuality, and to be valued for our personal attributes. This applies even more strongly when it comes to our jobs. We beat out tens, hundreds, even thousands of candidates to secure employment. So, we don’t want to feel our career path is stenciled and replicable. We want to feel our professional journey is one of a kind, crafted to our specific abilities and traits. Implementing personalized training paths takes little effort but is more than worth it to hold on to your top staff. Don’t provide them with courses that follow a one-size-fits-all model. They will move on to a company that’s better at recognizing their distinct benefit to the firm.
3. Insisting On A Centralized System
There’s an app for everything but not always for free. Even in the field of workforce development online training, adding that mobile element needs extra time, effort and money. You’d have to buy LMS with in-built mobile optimization, app templates or structured mobile frameworks. That additional feature can push your training costs up. Besides that, corporate leadership sometimes prefers office-based software because it gives more data control. But top talent also values autonomy. They need the space to be able to take initiative and plan their own agendas. Ignoring mobile training prevents that and can cut them off enough to renew their quest on a job hunt.
4. Focusing On The Employer Instead Of The Employee
In life there are leaders and followers. Both types of peoples are easy to recognize. Within your company, the ‘followers’ feel comfortable to do just enough to earn their salary. They arrive on time, obey instructions and leave right on the clock. They’re not *bad* workers, but they don’t stand out either. Your leaders – on the other hand – are innovative and forthcoming. They offer ideas and take initiative. Thus, when you’re designing workforce development you need to configure specifically to their character. Offer them courses that spark their creativity. A regular worker needs to know how to log time sheets. An exceptional worker may want to design their own job schedule. Instead of always thinking about what you want from them, find out what they want from you. Change your priorities.
5. Forgetting About Work-Related Skill Sets
When all is said and done employees need to be able to apply what they’ve learned on-the-job. Thus, one of the biggest online training mistakes you can make is not adhering to their practical skills. Workforce development online training is all about building talents and bridging gaps. Your online course needs to give them the tools they need to finetune their capabilities and troubleshoot problem areas. Throw theory out the window and focus on work-related skillsets that improve performance. Use assessments, LMS reports and surveys to identify the skill gaps. Then customize your strategy to address pain points.
6. Omitting Interactivity And Immersion
Modern employees expect a certain amount of interactivity when they login to the workforce development LMS. Activities that allow them to test out their knowledge in real-world settings to solve real-world problems. This also involves immersion so that they can see how they handle pressure and emotionally connect with the content. Every resource you upload to the system should facilitate practical application and experience building. Which gives your staff the power to reinforce what they know and spot areas which are susceptible to improvement. Simulations, scenarios, and bite-size games are just a few ways to get them hooked for them to tap into mistake-centered training.
Conclusion
If you’re losing your top employees it doesn't necessarily have to be about money. So when you dangle a counter-offer in front of them and they don’t take it, consider what else you may be misjudging. You may have workforce development software in place. But the implementation might be totally wrong. Some errors include minimal JIT resources and generic training paths. If you won’t let your team train on their laptops, smartphones, or tablets you’re restricting them. Your training emphasis is on what you want as an employer rather than what they want as employees. As such, they won’t stay on your payroll very long. You can’t please everyone but if anyone should dictate your workforce development strategy, let it be your top performers. Otherwise, they’ll just go shine their light at someone else’s firm.
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