An Evolving Workforce: Employee Development is the Key to Success

The Importance of Employee Development

Changes to how the workforce looks enforces the importance of employee development. Trends such as globalization, advancing technologies, changing employee demographics, and an increase in remote workers and multiple facilities make it more important than ever to provide employee development programs.

Some of these changes will create wider skill gaps, which requires proper training to deal with. Poor performance often comes when an employee doesn’t understand how to do their job properly. If they are unclear on their role, or not sure how to perform certain tasks, this will show in their performance.

Providing the opportunities for your employees to grow will ensure you’ll have the best workforce available for your company.

The Changing Demographics

Millennials are already one of the largest groups in the workforce, and by 2030 will make up 75% of the workforce. 87% of these millennials in the workplace say that professional development and career growth are very important to them.

In fact, 94% of all employees say they would stay longer with a company if the company invested in employee training. The importance of employee development is clear in these statistics.

Providing opportunities for employees will make them more engaged in your company. When employees feel like they have a chance to succeed within your company, they will be more involved and focused.

What Does Employee Development do For Your Company?

Changes to how employees develop in their careers increases the importance of employee development. Most employees these days will go through multiple positions and employment options. This includes self-employment, remote work, and individual employers.

These changes to how the workforce looks means continued education to maintain careers is more important than ever. New technologies create opportunities to recruit on a global scale. This means you need processes in place to train employees across the world.

You want to make sure employees have the skillset they need no matter where they are located. Employees need opportunities to understand emerging technologies that make this workforce evolution possible. They also need good soft skills to meet the demands of the changing workplace.

Prepare Employees to Deal with The Unexpected

One thing that highlights the importance of employee development is the large possibility of the unexpected. New technologies, changing strategies, unexpected opportunities, etc. can cause stress if employees aren’t prepared for potential changes.

Strategies can change along the way, but if you take the time to develop employee skills, you will create a workforce ready to meet those changes and find new strategies to solve unexpected issues and challenges.

Increase Employee Promotability

Employee development programs help you create a promotable workforce, making it easier to find skilled people to meet your company needs in key positions. Employees who know you value them enough to train them for possible promotion will more likely remain loyal to your company, meaning you have a good place to start when those positions come up.

These employee development programs can help you choose and train future leaders for your organization. If you see leadership potential in an employee, developing those skills as they go will make that transition easier when the time comes.

Promote Collaboration

Departmental collaboration is another area that shows the importance of employee development. Departments do not work separately from each other in an organization, yet often communication between departments is lacking.

Help employees in different departments understand how they work together by cross-training. Let them see for themselves how what they do affects others in the company and encourage them to work together. Providing this cross-training will help departments mesh and communicate better.

Increase Recruitment Potential

Since the majority of the current workforce puts high priority on employee development, providing these opportunities can act as a recruitment tool. Showing potential employees your desire to provide skill development opportunities will show a culture of progress and concern for employee needs.

This will help you recruit the best talent for your company needs as you are showing them you are serious about taking care of your employees. They will know they have the opportunity to grow in your company.

Boost Employee Performance

Taking the time to properly train employees will help them feel more secure in their roles. This requires an ongoing employee development program that focuses on skill areas employees need help with.

Taking the time to understand what causes poor performance and what areas employees are struggling in will help you get at the root cause of issues. Helping them feel better prepared will make employees more productive across the board.

Implementing a Strong Employee Development Program

When it comes to creating an employee development program, you need to consider your company goals, including long-term goals. Provide training around both current and future needs to best prepare employees.

You also need to consider the needs of your employees. Since employees are the driving force behind the importance of employee development, you want to find out where they feel their skills are lacking and what their goals are. Build employee development around these needs as well.

Keep in mind that soft skills are just as important as departmental and company-specific training. Teaching things like time management, communication, problem-solving, and other soft skills creates a workplace that can meet all challenges.

Prepare an Evolving Workforce

One of the technological advances that helps you meet your employee development needs is the use of online training management systems like Infinit-I Workforce Solutions. We understand the importance of employee development and provide the tools you need to create a program that meets your needs.

With access to a library of training videos developed to improve employee understanding, and the capability to implement custom content to meet your specific requirements, you can have all your training in one place. We also have tracking and reporting tools to help you keep up with progress and documentation. Infinit-I Workforce Solutions provides a simple way to improve your employee development program. You can see how easy our system is to use by requesting a free demo.