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Enabling employees to succeed in a fast-changing business environment
should be central to every organization’s strategy. After all, when
employees are properly equipped with the right set of skills, they’re
best positioned to add maximum value to both the organization and its
customer base. Are education, training, and lifelong learning for your
workforce important to your company? Or do I really need to ask if your
workforce is truly motivated and engaged as learners?
In a typical company, learning nuggets are accessed in clumps in
various places, with all sorts of gaps in between. One or more people
in a work group will take advantage of opportunities — and information
will be shared with others in the group. Some managers inform their
teams and encourage participation, while others don’t. With the typical
hit-and-miss approach, many employees at various levels never find out
about opportunities to sharpen their skills that would otherwise be
available to them. With rapid changes in technology and business
processes, new training can be a matter of someone keeping a job or
being left behind. However, it’s interesting that when employees hear
that they need new training, their first response can often be a yawn or
a grumble. People don’t always see training as an opportunity that
will help them. Instead, training can feel like a hassle, like one more
thing added to a mounting list of responsibilities.
In order to improve learning participation and motivation try some of the following:
- Have each employee complete a survey regarding their learning needs and interests.
- Route the results through their managers to add items the manager feels are important either for current or future projects.
- Assign learning resources based on the personalized needs of each employee.
- Provide time on the schedule to complete training, shadowing, mentoring, or other learning activities.
- Track usage and completion of learning tasks.
- Allow employees to update their learning profiles on an ongoing basis to reflect their progress and changing needs.
Companies that take the above steps dramatically broaden employee
growth and development across the organization. Usage of one resource – e-learning– averages 30% at most companies, but a recent study by Bersin & Associates
showed that systematic approaches like the steps above lead to 70%
usage or more. They take you a sizeable step in the direction of
integrating learning opportunities into the fabric of your organization.
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