Leaders who don’t plan exactly what they want their training to accomplish are wasting resources. In a learning culture, management and HR work together to define the values, processes and practices that employees, departments and the organization can use to increase their performance and competencies. The knowledge and skills acquired and applied by employees is shared freely in a learning culture, creating a sustainable and adaptable organization.

Keep the future work skills in mind to maintain the continued health of your organization. Management must target employees who can take over future leadership roles. For current employees, immediately begin training on leadership development and equip them with future work skills like: problem-solving skills, sense-making, emotional intelligence, cross-cultural and virtual teamwork, etc. If they aren’t already, HR can target job candidates with leadership potential in all their talent acquisition efforts. Management can help develop future leaders and managers as soon as new employees enter the door by providing mentors and helping them build professional networks. Improving leadership development programs helps to build teams that are agile and capable of evolving with the times.

As organizations become more diverse and broaden their reach, company leaders see the value in developing their employees’ soft skills, such as emotional intelligence, collaboration, and negotiation. In fact, more than 90% of respondents to a 2016 Deloitte survey rated soft skills a “critical priority.” They also indicated that soft skills can foster employee retention, improve leadership, and build a meaningful culture.

There is a misunderstanding about gamification and training programs in the real world. Unwitting business owners will scoff at the notion of gamification because they believe it means turning their training programs into video games. Understandably, they feel that their critical and potentially life-saving OSHA-compliance training should not be equivalent to Donkey Kong. What they don’t realize is that gamefication is simply a process of building a progressive reward system into training that imitates modern video games.
Badges, points, leaderboards and community involvement incentivize the online training experience for even the most jaded learner. Learners who lack the passion and drive to participate can use these tools as a springboard until their core motivation kicks in.

According to a 2018 study by LinkedIn, the biggest challenge for talent development is getting employees to make time for learning. Employees would agree that they don’t have the time to take away from their primary jobs to get the training. Delivering your training on multiple platforms, such as classroom, mobile and on-demand, can help eliminate the time crunch for busy employees.

Training in the past that focused solely on content was “one size fits all,” which made it difficult to engage with the trainee. Today, we must zero in on the trainee, including his or her experience, work environment, performance and technological fluency, to create a training program. Any effective training program is one developed for the individual and offers social activities to share their experiences.
As you train, think of your employees as consumers. They are used to getting 500,000 results per search on Google, YouTube automatically playing related videos based on what they’ve just watched, and Netflix suggesting content matches based on viewing pattern algorithms. For the learning consumer, training clips on your YouTube channel, a classroom training session, a MOOC (massive online open course), or a post shared on Facebook Workplace are elements that can be turned into training content. Badges, points, leaderboards and community involvement incentivize the online training experience for even the most jaded learner. Learners who lack the passion and drive to participate can use these tools as a springboard until their core motivation kicks in.

Training can be a key differentiator between companies competing for talent. Employees want to work for organizations that provide personal and professional development, and they consider it a deciding factor when looking for new employment or determining if they should stay with their current employer. Learning and development play a critical role in engaging — and retaining — employees. Leverage your training as an employee incentive, and add it to your existing benefits package alongside retirement and health and wellness options.