WithAI and other technologies advancing at ultrasonic speed, the urgency for employee training and development has grown as well. Research from McKinsey reveals that 87% of companies worldwide recognize that they either already face a skills gap or will within a few years.
This underscores the urgent need for businesses to prioritize employee training initiatives like reskilling and upskilling. In fact, the same study found that 53% of respondents identified skill building as the most effective action to close capability gaps within the next year, making it the top-ranked strategy.
Furthermore, Wiley's Closing the Skills Gap report highlights the challenges organizations face due to the skills gap, particularly in recruitment and retention. Nearly half of the employers reported that at least 10% of their open roles went unfilled, escalating to 20% among those recognizing a skills gap. This trend underscores the growing necessity for employers to prioritize employee development initiatives. As emphasized by Todd Zipper, executive vice president at Wiley, investing in learning and development, workforce training, and flexible education benefits is crucial for addressing the skills gap and enhancing employee retention.
Employee training and development software is a useful component of employee training as they help facilitate the learning process, increase engagement, and ensure that employees acquire the necessary skills and knowledge effectively.
With a knowledge base, you can allow your customers to self-help themselves, thus reducing your customer support by up to 60%. Furthermore, you can also have your team get instant answers to the questions they need without having to email themselves all using knowledge base software.
The purpose of knowledge base software is to allow you to host your knowledge base/corporate wiki in one centralized 'hub'. Both your customers, and employees can now access information within seconds!
Employee training and development is important for ensuring that staff are prepared for their role; that they feel supported, valued, and capable; and that they have upward movement. Training and development can have a direct impact on employee engagement and retention and should be an integral part of your talent management strategy.
Employee training and development is both present- and future-focused. Employee learning programs support your people in meeting the challenges of the business, today. And employee learning programs create a pipeline of leaders to meet the societal and technological challenges of tomorrow.
Julian says employee training also ensures people feel valued, and feel that their employer sees them playing a role in the long term. This feeds into the overall company culture. In fact, in our survey of employees at the 2023 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, 87% said they often or always feel like they are offered training and resources to develop professionally.
Both employers demonstrate how employee development is a two-way conversation, not a one-way, top-down instruction. This kind of approach to employee development can have a huge impact on employee engagement, especially among younger demographics.
At Panda Restaurant Group, for example, retention among millennial employees is particularly high, thanks in part to its mentorship approach and its University of Panda program, which helps employees to earn certifications and continue their career growth outside of the workplace.
Some organizations are helping employee advance with an internal talent marketplace. An internal talent marketplace is a platform or system within an organization that facilitates identifying, developing, and retaining top talent by providing employees with opportunities for growth and career advancement.
This marketplace enables employees to explore different roles, projects, or positions within the company, promoting internal mobility, skill development, and cross-functional collaboration. By creating an internal talent marketplace, organizations can better retain talent, improve employee satisfaction, and enhance their overall agility while reducing the need for external hiring.
For example, the benefits team at Panda offers a monthly series of educational webinars covering topics such as healthy habits, nutrition, sleep, finance, and self-care. They also work directly with regional and department leaders to curate programs specific to their teams and provide free wellness coaches to teams in need.
Similarly, industrial services distributor Grainger has a mandatory e-learning course on unconscious bias. The one-hour course outlines what unconscious bias is, explores how it may emerge in day-to-day work, and offers effective behaviors for managing it.
Julian recommends that participants be given the chance to talk through the training, to understand what fits and wrestle with problems, rather than running passive sessions where the trainer talks and participants sit and listen.
Providing employee training and development opportunities can enhance job satisfaction, boost productivity, and improve employee retention. Equipping employees with new skills and knowledge increases their potential for advancement within the company. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved.
According to Deloitte, organizations with a strong learning culture are 92% more likely to develop new product innovations or novel process improvements, and are overall 52% more productive. However, 59% of employees claim they received no workplace training and the skills required to do their job effectively were self-taught.
This highlights a curious trend of employees relying on self-taught skills, despite organizations acknowledging the importance of workplace training for professional growth, upskilling, and team improvement. This can be attributed to companies viewing employee training as an expense rather than an investment. Many organizations also must maintain current levels of output and productivity before focusing on learning and development opportunities.
From onboarding new hires to upskilling workers for emerging responsibilities, employee training programs are designed to align individual growth with organizational goals, futureproofing organizations and enabling them to remain competitive, innovate, and achieve business outcomes.
Effective employee orientation training provides basic organizational information that new hires need to prepare for their role in a company. The orientation program benefits both employees and employers by educating new hires, setting them up for success in their new roles, addressing any questions they might have, and helping them contribute to the organization right away.
Onboarding training is the process of support new hires with the resources and knowledge they need to become productive in the role quickly, like understanding their responsibilities, become familiar with company culture, how to use company resources, learning about company products, and more.
While employee orientation is a 1-2 days process, the employee onboarding process is a series of events that take place over a longer time period. The length of employee onboarding depends on the organization and the role, and can take anywhere from a week, a month, to a full year. Onboarding is responsible for truly integrating an employee within an organization.
An effective compliance training program helps prevent poor conduct, ensures proper governance, safeguards companies from risks, and protects employees. It minimize risks to the company and provides a better and safe workplace environment for employees.
Depending on different employee roles, product training focuses on various aspects and has other learning goals. Value-adding product training enables a marketing team to reach the right market and a sales team to answer the critical questions customers are looking for.
Leadership training develops lower-level employees into future leaders and helps existing leaders maintain their thought leadership and expertise. Leadership development training provide several essential benefits to organizational growth, like:
However, while these enterprise applications provide the technology to achieve business outcomes, employees must know how to correctly use these applications and their custom-build workflows to achieve those results.
While organizations expect employees to have baseline knowledge of how to use these mission-critical systems, every organization has its own processes and governance to follow. This requires both dedicated technical training sessions and on-demand performance support that enable employees to maximize the potential of these applications.
With a digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix, organizations can use a no-code editor to create in-app guided experiences and on-demand performance support that overlay your software applications.
With Whatfix DAP, reduce application time-to-proficiency for new hires, support employees with guided tutorials on complex workflows or infrequently done tasks, and drive process governance by creating timely in-app alerts and tips that provide additional context and support at key friction areas.
Quality assurance training helps employees better understand quality assurance activities and improve processes that ensure the final product or service meets set quality standards, which leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Effective sales training programs focus on helping sales teams define the benefits of products and services, address the unmet needs of the client, and how to progress deals and conversations through the pipeline to ultimately close.
A core use case of Whatfix is drive sales business outcomes by enabling sellers to maximize their CRM usage. Via in-app guided experiences, sellers can learn how to use advanced CRM features and find the data they need to close deals. Task Lists provide sellers a detailed overview of important processes and playbooks to keep in mind. Self Help allows leaders to provide sellers an in-app CRM help center complete with in-app tutorials on how to complete various sales processes, links to playbooks and documentation, and more.
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