Does your business regularly encourage employee development?
Allowing your employees to follow their own learning path to improve their skills is better because you aren’t providing pressures and strict deadlines which could be seen as learning deterrents.
However, a study found that 40% of employees who don’t receive the necessary job training to become effective will leave their positions within the first year.
A lack of proactive behaviour in supporting your employees’ development leads to them not feeling valued or desired by you as a company.
But isn’t it down to your employees to drive their own development? Well, research found that 74% of employees felt they weren’t achieving their full potential at work due to lack of development opportunities. The demand is there, it just seems to not be being fulfilled.
Overall, it is clear to see that employee development should be a part of your work culture.
So, how can your business achieve this? In our recent blog around employee development, we covered the benefits of it. This time we’re sharing how to build employee development into your workplace. Let’s get started…
Offer continuous professional development opportunities
Don’t wait for the employee to ask. Discover the skills gaps or improvement points and share relevant training to employees on an individual basis through different learning materials.
It could be an eLearning course for their role or some online material you thought would suit them.
You could even create a knowledge hub and update regularly to ensure everyone has constant and equal opportunities to develop. This is beneficial as it shows the business care about development and equality whilst allowing employees to learn at their own pace.
Schedule annual reviews of employee development
Reviews are vital in order to be able to continually provide relevant development opportunities to your employees. Ask for feedback and utilise this to create future objectives
Provide feedback to your employees
It is just as important to provide feedback as it is to receive it. Your employees won’t know how they can improve and develop without being given feedback.
Identifying points of improvement or simply recognising good work is beneficial to pushing employees further in the business.
Encourage a growth-orientated approach
As mentioned, building employee development into your work culture is key and by taking a growth-orientated approach can do exactly this.
This means integrating learning opportunities into your employees’ daily work practices. For example, small teams could have a weekly rota where one employee can focus on training for the day. If you work on a larger scale, you could provide Your team with more time to work towards learning a new skill or team activity.
Employee development: lead by example
You can’t expect your employees to improve and develop if you aren’t yourself. Put in the effort to re-train and learn new skills because by demonstrating this, others will feel motivated.
Seek professional support
Creating content that is suited to your company and employees is difficult alone. Ask for support!
Training needs to be right in order for employees to retain information and stay engaged. If not, growth will be hard to achieve.
Bringing in external support whether you are creating a course from scratch or for redesign can allow you to break those learning barriers. In turn increasing the likelihood of employees wanting to learn.
Taking small steps to build employee development into your work culture will bring multiple benefits for you and most importantly your employees.
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