Supporting the growth and advancement of your employees is crucial if you want to boost retention and address any existing skill gaps. Ideally, employers need to be proactive, presenting their workforce with professional development opportunities and outwardly encouraging workers to take part. If you aren’t sure how to begin, here are some options that can help you better support your employees’ professional development.

4 Ways to Support Your Employees Professional Development

Implement an Adaptable Learning Management System

Having a robust learning management system (LMS) is ideal if you want to make formal training accessible. However, the LMS also needs to be adaptable if you’re going to support your employees’ growth in a meaningful way.

Make sure you choose a solution that allows for customized learning plans. By adjusting the requirements based on a worker’s role and their existing knowledge, you make the training more relevant and engaging, leading to better outcomes.

Additionally, find a platform that offers immediate feedback and rewards progress. That also boosts engagement while ensuring employees can learn from mistakes right away, getting them on the right path faster.

Provide Real-Time Feedback (and Turn It into Coaching Opportunities)

Limiting feedback to annual reviews isn’t a wise move. Often, any presented events occurred far before the meeting, making any insights relating to the problem less effective at improving behavior or outcomes.

Instead, managers should provide feedback in real-time. Along with recognizing achievements, they should take the employee aside to discuss missteps. Then, in the latter situation, turn the conversation into a coaching opportunity. Work with the employee to identify what went wrong and come up with a plan to handle it better in the future. That way, their growth is supported right when they need guidance most.

Launch a Mentorship Program to Pair Employees

Having access to a mentor can be excellent for professional development. As a result, many professionals seek one out. However, if there isn’t a clear connection in their workplace, that can mean looking outside of the company, which may not be ideal for employers.

By launching an internal platform, you make it easier for employees to forge these critical relationships with others in your organization. Essentially, you’ll cultivate a clear pathway for mentees to find potential mentors, as well as give them a clear go-ahead to foster that relationship during work time. Along with boosting professional development, this could bolster loyalty, improving retention and job satisfaction on two fronts.

Start a Cross-Training Program

Avoiding information siloes is critical. By starting a cross-training program, you can help employees build relevant skills in work areas close to their own. Along with broadening the capabilities of your workforce, it improves coverage; ensuring crucial tasks are manageable even when another worker is absent. Plus, it promotes stronger communication and collaboration, increasing cross-departmental efficiency.

Ultimately, each of the options above can help you betters support your employees’ professional development. It allows you to create a number of opportunities and openly showcase your support. In turn, retention and job satisfaction typically improve, as well as productivity.

Ready to Build Your Team?

If you’d like to learn more about how you can bolster your workforce’s capabilities, enhance loyalty, and cultivate critical skills your company needs to thrive, the skilled team at TempStaff can help. Contact us to speak with a member of our staff today and see how our expertise can benefit you.