How to enable continuous professional development throughout your organization

Continuous employee professional development is crucial to ensure your organization has the flexibility to adapt to an ever-evolving business landscape. With technologies, industry trends, and customer demands changing regularly, your workforce is the key to making sure your organization is at the forefront of tackling these changes.

To do this, your organization must prioritize professional development for employees. As such, we’ll explore why professional development is important, including the role of continuous learning, and how you can cultivate a learning culture.

Understanding the importance of continuous professional development

Continuous professional development should be a key part of any organization’s growth strategy as it has two major benefits:

1. It develops employees’ skills and knowledge. 
2. It ensures your business can adapt to an evolving landscape.

Each of these benefits feeds into one another to build a culture of learning. When your employees develop, they’re more engaged, which helps them to perform better. This allows your business to serve its customers better, which can reduce costs and increase revenue. By doing this, you feed back into the continuous development of employees, allowing for further innovation and growth, 

To understand the importance of continuous development, consider the following business impacts: 

• Improved employee engagement
• Increased job satisfaction
• Employees feel more valued
• Lower employee turnover
• Improved performance
• Improved productivity
• More use of creativity and innovation
• Meet compliance requirements

How to implement a culture of continuous learning in your organization

Once you understand the impact of professional development programs on employees, you can begin implementing one at your organization. The good news is you likely already have the tools and resources you need to make it happen:

1. To embrace continuous development, your workforce must know your leadership team is actively participating. After all, if your leadership team doesn’t practice what they preach, how can they expect the rest of your workforce to?
2. Establish clear and achievable goals early so employees know what’s expected of them. Use employee PDPs and personal development at scale so employee goals align with organizational goals. 
3. Communicate the value of continuous professional development and ensure employees have all the tools, time, and resources they need. Highlight the benefits of micro-credentials to help improve engagement.
4. Use your learning management system (LMS) and create a collection of online courses, such as those provided by Go1.
5. Regularly recognize and reward employees’ learning achievements across your organization.
6. Encourage collaborative learning to improve engagement and retention.
7. Evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy using data, which will also allow you to understand the ROI of your training.
8. Introduce a professional development coach to guide employees.

Utilizing technology for continuous professional development

Creating a culture of continuous professional development is only possible by utilizing the right technology. In-person training and classroom-type sessions will always have their place, but with many organizations working from different office locations, or adopting hybrid or remote working, ensuring you have the right technology is vital. For example, even in a virtual working environment, video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Google Meet ensure tutor-led learning and workshops still have their place.

There are many benefits to using an LMS, but one of the key benefits is how accessible and flexible training can be. You can access training at any time, using any device. Features such as single sign-on (SSO) allow employees to access training and make the best use of their time, while microlearning means that even if an employee has just 10 minutes to spare, they can still use that time to learn.

From an administrative point of view, LMSs also provide you with data about engagement and course completion, allowing managers to offer extra support to employees who need it.

At Go1, we have a huge database of online learning resources that can be integrated with hundreds of LMSs. So, whatever skills your employees want to develop, you can easily provide them with the resources they need.

Key performance indicators for learning initiatives

Key performance indicators (KPIs) for learning initiatives are important for tracking the effectiveness and ROI of training programs. Below are some KPIs your business can use to measure the impact of training:

• LMS Data - Data available through your LMS, such as training completion rate, assessment scores, and engagement rate, allows you to monitor how and when employees access training.
• Knowledge acquisition - This lets you measure the knowledge and skills employees have retained after completing training.
• Performance - Depending on the type of training, metrics such as customer satisfaction scores, revenue, average order value, and conversion rates are useful.
• Return on investment - Measuring the ROI of training programs is a great way to assess their effectiveness.
• Employee retention - Employees that feel valued tend to be less inclined to seek alternative employment.
• Employee feedback - It’s important to get feedback from employees to gauge how they feel about their development opportunities. 

Build a culture of continuous professional development at your organization

Now that you know how to enable professional development, why not start upskilling your employees? At Go1, we have a vast selection of online training courses that integrate with hundreds of LMSs, making personalized learning at scale simple.

For more information, download our guide on five new thinking habits for a smarter, stronger L&D, or speak to one of our experts to find out how Go1 can upskill your workforce.