Why You Should Invest In Lifelong Training For Your Employees Right Now

Why You Should Invest In Lifelong Training For Your Employees Right Now
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Summary: In a harsh market where "adapt or perish" is the order of the day, the best way for your business to stay relevant is to invest in continuous education.

Lifelong Training: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

An education was something that used to happen early in one's life—something that you acquired between kindergarten and university. It was also supposed to last you a lifetime. People who started working for some company also expected to retire at that same company.

Nowadays, between the fast pace of technological development, the forces globalization, and the myriad market disruptions, the idea that employees can stop learning, and stop developing, new skills appears increasingly antiquated (not to mention dangerous to one's career).

The answer, of course, is lifelong training.

So, What Exactly Is Lifelong Training?

Good question. And there's not a single answer, as lifelong training has multiple facets.

Part of it covers regular employee training programs, but it goes beyond that, into training on skills such as time management, skills management, leadership, and so on.

In other words, lifelong learning in the workplace stands at the cross-section of continuous employee training and career development.

Why Should Your Company Invest In Lifelong Training?

A better question would be, why shouldn't it? Lifelong training has many tangible benefits related to both employee satisfaction (and thus retention) and productivity (and, thus, your bottom line). Ongoing training for employees helps with:

1. Employee Skills Improvement

Even within the same job function, skills that were more than adequate ten years ago can be awfully lacking today.

Mobile web design was in its infancy in 2007. It's very much the mainstream today, and a web designer whose skills are stuck in the pre-mobile era doesn't cut it anymore. Similarly, Chinese tourism was not a thing a successful hotel manager was prepared to cater to a decade or so ago. Now, Chinese vacationers (hundreds of millions of them) dominate.

In a rapidly changing global economy, employees that don't constantly develop and enrich their skills can easily get left behind—and the same holds for the companies that employ them.

Lifelong training will let you smoothly transition to new technologies and allow you to adapt to changing market conditions.

2. Career Advancement

Updating your employees on the current trends affecting their existing position is not enough. You also need to prepare them for more responsible roles, higher up in your corporate hierarchy.

Lifelong training will help you guide employees from entry level positions all the way to higher management.

3. Employee Retention

Employee retention is positively correlated with career advancement opportunities. You can't expect employees to be loyal to your company if they feel that their effort is not being recognized.

A lifelong training program, especially one that's part of a comprehensible career advancement path, sends employees the signal that your company does not see them as replaceable cogs, and is prepared to invest in their professional development.

In fact, by investing in a lifelong training scheme, you will not only retain employees but will attract the right kind of new talent, people that value businesses that stay on the cutting edge.

4. Nurturing Leaders

Beyond offering career advancement opportunities to your regular employees, you also need to nurture your future leaders, people that can inspire and engage their teams, and who one day might raise to be your new C-level execs.

Leadership skills training (as part of a lifelong training curriculum), will help you identify potential leaders and track their progress before they even get the chance to actually lead anyone.

5. Employee Engagement

Allowing employees to learn new skills and tackle new responsibilities as part of a lifelong training program, can help cultivate a shared sense of purpose among your employees—especially as they get to see different aspects and stages of the company's work cycle.

Such an exposure helps to keep employees' minds fresh and gives them a chance to try, and perhaps gravitate to, other roles that they consider a better fit for them. This is a cheap and effective way of keeping staff happy and increasing employee engagement.

Isn't Lifelong Training Costly And Time-Consuming?

A decade ago the answer to this question might have been yes. Today, it's an emphatic "no", as all you need to create, deploy, and run your lifelong training program is a capable LMS platform.

If you go for something like TalentLMS, which is cloud-based, you don't even need any servers or installations, as those things are handled for you. What's more, your annual training costs will be much lower than what your monthly costs would have been back in the days of physical classrooms and in-person training seminars.

You'll probably encounter many industry buzzwords when you search for the right enterprise LMS, but you'll really can't go wrong with something mature and powerful such as TalentLMS.

It has intuitive content creation tools that make it dead easy to create your lifelong training material, a powerful test and quiz engine, comprehensive reporting capabilities, configurable certificates, and loads of other things besides that make it a great lifelong learning platform.

Conclusion

In today's business conditions, adopting a lifelong learning program is crucial, not just as a tool for employee development, but even more so as a strategic bet on the future and overall success of your business.

Invest in employee training, and watch as your staff's productivity and engagement increases. Start today by creating a forever-free account at TalentLMS, and kickstart your employee lifelong training.

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Easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to like, TalentLMS is designed to get a “yes” from everyone, including C-level execs, budget heads, and busy employees. Now, instead of checking out, your whole organization leans into training.