Employee personal growth and Learning and Development

Employees are key to achieving organizational goals especially when the economic is challenging and new skills evolving daily. According to Deloitte Human Capital Trends survey, 72% of executives identified “the ability of their people to adapt, reskill, and assume new roles” as the most important and second most important to navigate future disruptions. Thus, building workforce capability through upskilling, reskilling, and mobility is one of the most crucial actions leaders can take to improve performance and bootst employee engagement.

In addition, the “great resignation” has shown that millions of people are reconfiguring their careers. Learning and development continue to be number one reason for employee to quit their job.

Employees are finding jobs that give them the opportunities to grow, internal job rotation, right pay, benefits, a better work-life balance, and the ability to make deliberate choices for their career development.

In such context where employees are leaving to your competitors who provide better development opportunity and workplace culture, executives and HR leaders need a new approach to manage employee development.

The new approach should prioritise people's skills development and move away from managing work performed in jobs organized in a hierarchy - starting with knowing your current competencies and optimised employee development strategy.

Successful employee development offers many business benefits, from adding value to your brand, creating a continuous learning culture to unleash workforce capabilities and cultivate the skills needed for tomorrow.

In this article, we explore what should be included within your employee development strategy and the main benefits of having such a strategy in place.  

Strategies for Employee Development

Employee development refers to all the initiatives organization can take to improve employees' existing skills and competencies. That means formal training, assessment, job experience and interpersonal relationship.

Personal development is starting to be a strategic topic in organizations big and small. It has become obvious that in order to overcome business constraint to grow, they need to introduce more inclusion and diversity into the people development process. Not only it allows employees to design specific plan to build the skills and capabilities needed, but it also offers a great avenue to employ more junior people and grow them into specific positions in a cost-effective way.

There is no one size fit all – process but some of the most common approaches include:

• Growth plan: encourage employee to build their career development path and maps learning initiatives to specific company’s objectives, helps employees understanding of why those objectives and skills are important, and creates opportunities for employees to put learnings into practice.
• On-the-Job Training: This type of training occurs when employees learn new skills by working alongside more experienced colleagues. It's an inexpensive and efficient way to train employees, and it allows them to apply what they've learned quickly in a real-world setting.
• Mentorship Programs: A mentorship program pairs experienced employees with new or inexperienced workers for guidance and support.
• Micro-learning: As L&D is becoming more important in 2022, organization that want to stay on the top of their game need to foster a learning and development culture in the workplace. Tips micro-learning is a training methodology involving shorter courses (lasting between five and 15 minutes) to help employees quickly learn new skills. While this approach requires more planning than others, it can be highly cost-effective since you don't need to provide additional resources like trainers or equipment.
• Growth Mindset Training: The concept of growth mindset has been gaining popularity in recent years among educators and business leaders alike. A growth mindset means having the desire to continually improve your abilities through training, coaching, and experience. Employees with a growth mindset are valuable assets because they're always looking for ways to become better at their jobs.

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Employee Development Strategies

Here are some tips to keep in mind when making efforts for employee development in your workplace.

• Understand your company objectives. Your employee development initiatives must be aligned with your business goals. Doing so will allow you to invest in the right places.
• Upskill and reskill. Upskilling refers to providing employees with training that aligns with their current position, while reskilling involves providing them with the skills they need to advance. Both can help ensure that your employees' skills don't become obsolete and are still beneficial with the changing times.
• Create a learning and development culture. Visa is an excellent example of a large-scale company with a strong learning culture. They do so by establishing a corporate university and a learning team. Use the same approach in your organization to provide an industry-leading curriculum for your employees.
• Include leadership development. Identify who the future leaders in your company are. Then, curate a leadership development plan for them and build a solid talent pipeline that's prepared to deal with whatever comes its way in the future.

Conclusion

New year calls for new employee development approach. It’s time to move away from the traditional to employ a workforce development approach that considers both the dynamic nature of jobs and the potential of workers to reinvent themselves. It will help you raise the stakes in your industry, preparing you for whatever new challenges come your way.  

We hope this post helps you gain more insights to employee development strategies. And whenever you need additional assistance to bridge the gap between your employees' skills and the requirements of your business for accelerated growth, remember that you can always start your 14 days free trial of Talbit.