21 May Training and Development Are Crucial to Employee Success
The business world moves and changes at a fast pace, and we must change with it. Training and development are crucial to employee success. These opportunities improve performance, increase engagement, and enhance employees’ leadership skills, leading to benefits in productivity, outcomes, and job satisfaction.
The main assumed purpose of training is to improve employee performance- and it does. Development opportunities have been shown to increase employee efficiency and efficacy, creating outcomes that better support a business’s specific goals. By creating a culture of learning, employees have opportunities to enhance their skills and knowledge.
Training also engages employees. This results in increased overall job satisfaction because employees feel valued when they see companies invest in them. When employees feel valued, they also stay at that company for longer, thus increasing employee retention. Additionally, employees that stay feel more motivated to help the company because they are valued and therefore want to help, again increasing productivity, creating better outcomes, and improving the overall work culture.
The third outcome of training is enhanced leadership skills in employees. These skills include communication, decision making, and conflict resolution skills. This improves management’s skills, but also the overall culture. As managers benefit, so do their teams, once again boosting productivity and satisfaction.
How can we help you? How do we achieve these outcomes? What can training consist of? The answer varies depending on your business model and your needs. The four main types of training are: seminars, on-the-job training, mentorship, and e-learning.
Seminars consist of an expert entering an environment purely focused on employee education in a specific topic or skill that may improve their work outcomes. However, they may also be expensive in both time and travel costs, and not all employees may be able to apply information learned in such an environment to their work environment.
On-the-job training is just as the name suggests; this method consists of hands-on experience for employees in the work environment. This is effective for practical learners and fast paced environments where real-time feedback is likely to assist. It can also highlight important aspects of a particular job. However, this type of training often will not provide a larger understanding of industry practices, and attempting to balance training and actual work can impact productivity negatively.
Mentorship is a highly individualized approach in which an experienced employee is paired with an employee with less experience to guide, coach, and “mentor” them. This builds organizational relationships, develops specific job skills, and crafts institutional knowledge. But outcomes for this approach depend on the quality of the relationship between the employees and the initial availability of a mentor, whose productivity may be impacted by guiding another employee.
E-learning stands for “electronic learning,” and as this name suggests, involves online, digital training. These modules allow flexible scheduling, thus allowing employees to learn at their own pace and schedule, which is particularly helpful if they have work responsibilities to balance as well. This form of training is the least expensive and easiest scale of training, too. However, it lacks social interaction, which means it can be isolating as well as neglecting practice of social skills. It also requires technology and internet access, which can be a barrier for some people.
Companies consist of their people. By investing in those peoples’ values and allowing them opportunities to grow and improve, companies see improvements in productivity, efficacy and efficiency, engagement, leadership skills, work culture, and more. By choosing an appropriate training method, organizations can see great improvement in their long-term success and outcomes.