Learn How To Support Your Employees Through Their Career Development Stages.
Growing, whether as a person or as a professional, is all about learning: We learn and, as we learn, we grow.
Sometimes this learning involves many hours of practicing (and "faking it till you make it"), and other times it comes from mistakes, big and small ones, that we translate into valuable experience.
In fact, there's this story about Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM on the latter case.
When one of his employees made a blunder that cost the company several million dollars, Watson called him into his office. The guy went in, fearing that he was going to be fired, only to hear Watson say: "Fire you? We've just spent several million dollars educating you".
Now, while that's a fine story (whether it's true or not), and while hard-won experience can indeed be invaluable, the problem with both of those approaches is that they take too long, and are too costly.
In the modern, on demand, economy, you can't afford to wait for employees to "pick it up as they go along". And while we all make mistakes and learn from them, they're not the most reliable and cost-efficient way to train your employees either.
This is where modern corporate training comes into play, and why every sizable business needs its own eLearning-based employee training process.
In our last article, we showed how you can leverage eLearning in your career development stages, including pre-employee staging, to reduce employee turnover and boost overall productivity.
In this one, we will examine how eLearning applies to the more advanced career development stages, with a focus on leadership and management training and employee development. In fact, that's the very title of our next section...
Employee Development Training
We gave a few facts and statistics, in our previous articles, about how big of a problem a high employee turnover rate can be.
Most large and medium businesses already know that this is the case painfully well (perhaps that's the very reason you are reading this blog article in the first place).
Moreover, employee churn is not just something that occurs within the first months or first year of hiring -- it can be a problem for employees of any seniority level. In fact, the more senior the employee that decides to leave, the bigger the impact their departure will have on their company.
Employee development training will help you reduce employee churn by offering your employees more career development stages in order to advance their career where they are.
Whether it's about training still fresh employees to take over increased responsibilities, or about leadership training for senior employees to advance to managerial positions, employee development training will help you increase employee satisfaction, reduce turnover, and leverage your talent pool to boost growth at the same time.
What's not to like?
Employee Skills Training
The first thing that your employee development strategy will need to tackle will be offering effective skills training.
Skills training is not about teaching your employees how to perform their overall job function -- they supposedly know that already, through their regular education, pre-employment training, etc.
What you need to offer them are all those different skills that can make them more efficient not just in their current position and role, but in any tasks you need them to perform -- which includes preparing them for more senior roles.
In other words, while some of your skills training courses should revolve around things that will help your employees with their narrow responsibilities (e.g. training on sales techniques for your sales representatives, or customer support 101 training for your call center hires), the rest should focus on more general skills that will be equally useful to your employees as they advance through their career (and which you should take into consideration when promoting them).
In other words, your skills training curriculum should include core business skills, industry-specific skills, computer literacy skills, "people" skills related to sales and customer support, and more, and should be offered not to those who you want to immediately put them to use, but to any employee who wishes to expand their skillset and take advantage of career development stages.
Last, but not least, you should have some mechanism/policy in place to promote employees that have exhibited the best skills training performance.
Leadership And Management Training
Preparing promising employees for managerial roles, and educating existing managers to increase their leadership skills, can be different than regular corporate training in several aspects.
For one, it should involve a far bigger focus on soft skills. Things like efficient time management, communication, and project planning, but also even hard to quantify and define subjects like decision making, problem-solving, leadership, teamwork, and persuasion.
Now, these kinds of skills can also come naturally to some. In fact, in many smaller companies, that's exactly what happens: some employees are more motivated and/or motivating than others, and end up de-facto guiding and/or managing a small team of their peers.
This is then recognized by the upper ups (or single upper up, for small companies), and these employees end up promoted to management roles, going through career development stages as the company grows.
For medium-sized and larger companies though, while you still need to recognize employees that are of "management" material, you really don't want them to only know what they managed to pick up themselves.
A more formal approach to management training will give you better results, and not just increase your managers-in-training leadership skills, but also their confidence.
eLearning For Skills And Leadership Training
Online training through a capable eLearning platform, else known as an LMS, is the ideal deployment method for your skills training and management training.
It is cheaper than traditional classroom-based training as you forgo not just renting space expenses and transportation costs, but you also minimize business disruptions as there are no rigid lesson schedules.
In fact, the latter is one of the major factors that eLearning is a great fit for leadership training: in the average company managers and senior employees have very little (if any) off-time during working hours and online learning gives them the flexibility to study at any time and from any place.
A tool like TalentLMS, with its freely available mobile client for iOS and Android, allows them to study on the go (including during their commute and even totally offline).
As for their content of their training courses, you could either create it yourself from scratch in your eLearning platform or buy it from an eLearning content vendor.
TalentLMS, for example, makes it a breeze to create new training courses and even allows you to leverage all kinds of already existing material you have lying around (think Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints, YouTube videos, and such).
And if you'd rather buy ready-made courses, TalentLMS will let you do that do, by allowing for importing SCORM/TinCan compatible lesson units and even including its own full blown content marketplace.
Sure, you might not find everything there (its Marketplace being still new-ish and growing), but it's especially stocked in general business skills and leadership-related courses.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed employee development and leadership/management training, and how a continuous training program accompanied with the appropriate career development stages can reduce turnover, increase employee satisfaction, and boost your company's efficiency.
With this and our previous article (which focused on pre-employment, induction and early stage training), we hope that we've managed to give you some tips and guidelines to plan your training for different development stages of your employees' careers.
Stay tuned for more TalentLMS related news, tips, tutorials and coverage, next week.
