Our Tips For Developing Your Employee’s Skills

Employers have a lot to grapple with on the day to day from business finances to hiring, client retention and so on.

It's little wonder, then, that employee skills development often tends to fall through the cracks. This is unfortunate, considering its contributions to a business.

Key among these include increased employee motivation and increased efficiencies that benefit the organization and support its profitability.

Here are some tips for developing your employee’s skills.

1. Bring It In-House

One of the easiest ways to encourage and ensure employee skills development is by having in-house training sessions. These training sessions can be tailored exactly to your needs, from design to length and from level to number of employees. The limits are your budget and your imagination!

The best thing about this is that you can standardize the skills and knowledge across your employee pool. You can also customize it to ensure your employees get the skills they require for your industry. This standardization will facilitate your processes and your company will gain competitive advantages.

You can have a trainer coming in or design custom e-learning courses for your employees. Some agencies specialize in designing customized training. You can choose from a set of existing courses or create a new one from scratch.

2. Pair Employees With Mentors

Each employee has an idea of how they want their career to pan out. What is often not so clear is how to get there. There are many options to help them find their way, such as discovery days, job referrals, but the best solution is to match employees with each other.

This is where mentorship comes in.

As an employer, it can help to pair newer employees with mentors, ideally in management and other supervisory roles. Skills development encompasses both formal training on the job, hands-on-training. Mentors help with the latter.

3. Create a Development Plan

As with anything else, it helps organizations to have a clearly outlined skills development policy. If you have an HR department, you can ask them to prepare a process to create a development plan for each of your employees. Otherwise, you can hire a consultant to do it for you.

This can include sitting down with employees to assess strengths and weaknesses in tandem with their appraisals and performance reviews.

This information can then be ploughed back into establishing goals regarding filling skill gaps and enhancing existing knowledge. When this is done vis a vis the competencies and organization required in specific roles, it becomes a win-win for both employee and organization.

4. Support Cross-Departmental Collaboration

A cohesive workplace does very well at cross-departmental collaboration. These collaborations help bridge the gap between cultures, encourage empathy, and allow employees to feel functions outside their official roles.

However, this does not often come without some maneuvering.

It helps lay down structures on how this can be done, which departments can trade skills and knowledge, and how often this can be possible without slowing down work processes.

5. Remove Barriers

It's not enough to say you are open to employee skills development and to create policies. You also have to knock down barriers that might make this difficult to do.

Think about it; you cannot encourage skills development without a willingness to invest in in-house training or allowing your employees time out to gain additional certifications. It will help to think critically about barriers that exist and how you can eliminate them.

Is It Worth It?

Indeed it is. Employees with sound skills propel an organization forward and are likelier to stay with the pro-development employer much longer. For any business, this is a worthwhile investment.