Modern employees value professional growth and development, it’s not just about the paycheck. If a company doesn’t want to see high turnover of their best and brightest, it’s important to offer satisfying opportunities for professional development.
Of course, employee turnover is not the only reason that professional development is important. Companies can see substantial advantages when they integrate a robust learning and development programs, such as, cultivation of leadership, more internal hiring ability, increase in job competency and efficiency, and happier, challenged employees. One of the most flexible, modern, robust ways to enhance professional development at your company is through the implementation of an Learning Management System (LMS).
Now let’s look at the ways a new LMS can enhance and provide professional development for your valuable professionals.
1. Introductory Assessments Build a Learner’s Profile
Because an LMS is built to not only provide content but to track and assist each learner individually, the first step toward professional development is to build a learner’s profile. This might include preferred learning styles, their current level of knowledge and skill, test-taking affinity, and certain personality quirks that can affect a professional’s ability and preferences for learning. When each current and new employee takes an introductory assessment, you can create a detailed profile for them within your LMS that will serve to support their professional development efforts in the future.
2. Personalized Lessons to Strengthen Weaknesses
Every professional has strengths and weaknesses, and often professional development is about building on both in a positive way. An LMS can be used to assess the exact areas where each professional could use a little extra improvement and then provide the right training material for the job. Let’s say you have a programmer who’s great at writing code but their documentation is disorganized or often missing, something often complained about by their team.
A properly equipped LMS can make it possible to run this developer through a friendly training program that prompts them to document test-code in an organized and predictable way. After a few weeks of practicing 15 minutes a day with the LMS, your programmer now habitually remembers to document in a way that can be read and used by their team and increasing their total value as a professional programmer.
3. Weekly Refreshers
An LMS can be used to provide personalized refreshers for information that is known but often slips over time. Weekly refreshers can be reminiscent of quizzes in school. They can be short assignments every Monday, for example, to get everyone in the right mindset for work after the weekend. Refreshers help employees keep goals, knowledge and policies fresh in the mind.
4. Staying Up-to-Date on Industry Knowledge
Technology continues to propel the world forward and every industry is consistently changing to keep up with these advancements. From medicine to law to cyber security, it is vital to build in forms of professional development to ensure that the organization and the employees who run it are staying competitive in your industry.
An LMS is a great tool to use in this regard because of the fast and flexible nature of it. Administrators can quickly update the platform with new, updated learning material in a matter of seconds, and can also incorporate pre-built courses from elsewhere on the web for their convenience.
5. Personal Coursework Recommendations
Many professionals want to pursue career advancement learning but just can’t find the time or the right courses for their needs. They mean to look into new professional courses but between work, commute, and family time at home, it just never happens. Or they mean to find the right courses but after skimming lesson names for five minutes, it all turns into a useless blur.
An LMS can solve this by taking all the seeking and guess-work out of the equation. Because an LMS is backed with all the latest personalization and content-serving technology, it can assess the career path and personal learning preferences of each professional and suggest the courses that would be the easiest to pursue and the most beneficial for every one of your employees.
6. Custom Coursework for Internal Positions
Another thing LMSs can manage for you is training for both internal and external hires. With the ability to build your own coursework and serve it in multiple dynamic ways to employees, you can create custom lessons for each internal position that needs to be filled. For new hires, this personalized the onboarding process in a way that a classroom with hand-outs never could. They can go through training that prepares them not just to be a company employee, but to fill the specific role they have been hired for. And with an LMS, new hires will be constantly connected to supporting HR staff who can answer questions and provide guidance at any time.
Of course, this is equally if not more useful for current employees who want a new internal position. Through the LMS, they can put themselves through position training courses on their own time, a dedication both their managers and HR will be able to see and encourage through the LMS.
7. Building Teams for Future Projects
LMSs can also be communication platforms that promote collaboration between teams and communication with HR instructors. This can serve a number of purposes, one of which is preparing and building teams for a project that has not yet begun. Through an LMS, the future members of a team can practice working together and collaborating with similar tasks and build their team dynamic before any budget or effort is put into the project they will eventually be working on. By the time the project is ready to begin, the team will already work like a well-oiled machine because they’ve been doing practice runs for a month or more beforehand.
8. Group Studies on Industry Issues
In some cases, professional development may not require any new information at all, simply the opportunity to discuss current industry issues with other professionals in order to develop ideas, in-depth understanding, and possible new solutions. Group discussions, round-tables, and shared studies are an integral part of both school-age and professional learning.
With an LMS, your professionals will be able to come together and essentially create their own coursework by challenging each other and the LMS can keep track of who shows leadership skills, has the best ideas, or even who is best at implementing the ideas created by others. This is a form of professional development that, if provided, would put you in a rare category of excellent employer. One thing that professional development almost never includes is the idea that the learners have something to each other and that those lessons can be as or more powerful than pre-made coursework.
9. Personal Assistance for Challenged Learners
Of course, not all professionals are self-starters or high-flyers. Sometimes, you may note that an employee is struggling to succeed at lessons or advance even when they are provided with material that is designed to help. While this is a problem for any manager who is concerned about their employees, an LMS provides a real solution to professionals who are challenged by their professional development journey.
The LMS not only tracks personal achievements, it can also help to identify where the problem is and connect struggling employees to the HR staff or others who can provide personal help where automated lessons weren’t doing the trick. With connection and guidance, you may see new and unexpected advancement from professionals who seemed to previously be stuck in a rut.
10. Providing the Personal Touch
Finally, the most notable benefit of a full-featured LMS is the personal touch. Instead of simply serving lessons and talking at your employees, an LMS encourages a culture of learning inside your business. The tool helps your organization create a knowledgeable, challenged workforce, allowing the leaders to emerge and your organization to flourish.
