The difficult times businesses find themselves in today require more than just reviewing development strategies and optimizing costs. The primary resource of companies is people, and the task of managers is to adapt the approach to professional development and training new skills of their employees to today’s realities. The crisis is not a reason to cut expenses on personnel training. In turbulent times, workplace training motivates, increases productivity, promotes team building and forms common goals. If you do not pay proper attention to workplace development, employees are more likely to go to other companies. In this article, we will discuss ways to improve workplace training.
Why do training and development in the workplace matter?
In addition to the territorial location of the office, salary, and social package, modern specialists look at motivation factors, including looking for opportunities for development and training in the workplace. Accordingly, highly qualified personnel prefer companies where workplace training is among the main advantages. According to Lorman:
- Companies with a well-developed training culture have a 30-50% higher employee retention rate than their competitors.
- 70% of employees are ready to move to a company where management invests in workplace training.
- 76% of employees believe that professional development in the workplace is one of the most important reasons to stay with the company.
Workplace training should be treated as customer education to be fruitful. This is why we will discuss 3 ways to improve workplace training in 2023 you should know.
3 ways to improve workplace training and development
You should understand that employees do not have the opportunity to devote hours to reviewing lectures or reading documents. Training information should be brief and concise, allowing them to find a solution to a problem or improve cybersecurity awareness in a few minutes. It is very useful to create a knowledge base with special tools that employees can access when needed. Training materials must be accessible from any device: the employee should be able to take the training in his free time and directly in the workplace. Capture training sessions with professional cameras.
Personalize workplace training
On a company scale, truly personalized workplace training can only be organized using LMS:
- Depending on the employee`s level of knowledge, they build a customized learning path
- The recommendation system offers individually tailored training
- Trainees receive prompt feedback as a result of automatic evaluation
As a result, the trainees and the company achieve the desired results, and the training itself is highly engaging. Built-in analytics allows an objective assessment of the interaction of trainees with the system, instructors, and each other. Based on this data, it becomes possible to identify the frequent shortcomings of the training process on time and to make operational adjustments.
Create practice-oriented workplace training
Practice-oriented workplace training can be achieved in different ways (and combinations thereof). Peer-to-peer learning is an option that does not require any material investments, only organizational restructuring. In the advanced version, the practical nature of learning is achieved by creating a learning environment with solutions to practical tasks that simulate work tasks.
The principle of peer-to-peer training in a company is that colleagues exchange practical experience and assess each other’s approaches to solving work tasks. An important point: the interaction is built on the principle of “peer to peer” (colleague to colleague), without the relationship of administrative subordination. How practice-oriented learning can take place in practice:
- A more experienced colleague teaches a less experienced colleague by passing on practical experience. This can be organized both offline and online.
- Colleagues discuss the problem and different approaches to its solution based on their practice.
- Reviewing each other’s work and trying to give constructive feedback. In the process, employees analyze the approaches to their colleagues’ work, adopt valuable techniques, and improve their communication skills.
The task of the instructor or mentor is to create an environment for this exchange of knowledge and experience.
Create workplace learning for soft skills
Training and development for new tasks and challenges are important. Such training includes the development of soft skills. In conditions where everyone has to change, training should teach the specialist to adapt to changes and make the best decisions given the circumstances. The following soft skills come to the fore in the current environment:
Cognitive:
- Goal-setting
- Decision making
- Self-efficacy management
- Critical and systematic thinking
Social:
- The art of communication
- Collaboration
- Resilience
- Client-centeredness
Emotional:
- Self-management
- Emotional intelligence
- Acceptance of oneself and others
Specialists responsible for staff training should develop methods for assessing specialists’ current soft skills and analyze the opportunities for their development among employees.
Conclusion
Even with the reduction of budgets for personnel development and training and the current unevenness of the market, companies of any kind of e-commerce business that remember the key resource (their employees) win.
It is crucial for people to feel their value and importance to the company for which they work. Training in the workplace in 2023 should be as practical, concentrated, and convenient as possible. Precious will be offline training, conferences with motivational speakers, and strengthening internal coaching practices. Now you know how to improve training and development in the workplace in 2023.