Learning is a continuous process, something that can never be complete. Therefore, it’s important to have processes in place to continue learning throughout an individual’s career. With the right systems and practices in place, you can effectively drive continuous learning and development within your organization to prevent people from getting stagnant or stale over time.
Training and onboarding
Training and onboarding are essential to build trust and confidence between an organization and their employees. For both the manager and employees, training can be a confidence builder and provide learnings on how to work together better. With training, everyone can become more aware of their own areas of strengths and areas for improvement. Organizations can then build a culture where people feel empowered to learn and grow within their roles. Training programs can be built for specific responsibilities and new roles within the organization. Managers, HR leaders, and executives can create programs to provide training specific to their roles and team members to help build skills and culture. Specifically, they can build comfort with new tools and tools that support the workflow of their roles.
Ongoing training and education
Managers who are willing to learn on their own and develop skills with their team members can begin to drive an ongoing training and education model within their team. With this, managers can set up educational programs for their team members on a regular basis. This can be done on topics related to business and technology. Topics can vary by organization, and managers can determine what is most relevant for their team and learnings. The educational programs can have segments, videos, and slides that can be shared and explored either in a group setting or by an individual. Discussion and exploration of the content can be done on a topic-specific Slack channel or in a private group. With educational programs, managers can help their team members build a strong and continuous skill set. This can help teams avoid silos and clear paths for cross-functional collaboration.
Credentialing and professional development
When it comes to continuous l&d process, having a culture of strong and consistent credentialing and professional development (PD) programs is essential. With these in place, employees can be confident in their skills and grow at a pace that’s right for them. Furthermore, employees can be confident that they are getting the right training at the right time. When it comes to PD, there’s a lot of confusion around what PD is and why it’s important to organizations. Some of the most common reasons organizations invest in PD are to help increase retention rates, improve engagement, increase performance, and help the organization be more nimble.
Ongoing meetings and events
When it comes to training and development, it’s also important to have events and meetings that provide an opportunity for employees to learn from their managers and peers. These types of events can be sponsored by your organization or external organizations that align with your industry. For example, a gathering for digital marketing managers to learn about marketing automation software, or a meeting for your sales leaders to learn about how to improve customer retention. These types of events can help build a culture of learning and sharing within an organization. By holding regular events, managers can create an opportunity to meet with peers and provide feedback on how they are doing their job. This provides a great opportunity for managers to continuously build their teams and leadership skills.
Wrapping up
The best way to drive continuous learning and development within an individual’s career is to have processes in place to help drive learning. With these processes in place, managers can help employees develop their skills while providing ongoing learning opportunities. With a culture of continuous learning and development, an organization is able to continuously drive growth within their organization. By staying current on the latest trends and technologies, organizations are able to stay competitive and avoid silos. With a culture of learning, an organization is able to build a team that is diverse, knowledgeable, and confident in their skills.