Why you need to be monitoring employee professional development

Are you monitoring employee performance and professional development in your team?

Keeping a close eye on the performance and progress of your team members is as much for their benefit as it is for yours. Because when we talk about monitoring performance, we're not talking about micromanaging people, or watching each individual staff member like a hawk – it’s about taking the time to help employees develop.

Many employees become unhappy in their jobs after some time, especially if they no longer find their work exciting or challenging. Professional development is the best way to help staff feel continually challenged, rewarded and energised by their work.

How Professional Development Programs Help Staff

If you’re an employer or manager, you should be taking the time to sit down with each team member, to devise a personalised action plan that will help them plan for their career.

Having a professional development program in place will help employees identify the skills they want to refresh or develop. These can be role-specific skills, for example graphic design, or skills that are focused more on personal development, such as becoming more resilient to change, responding well to feedback or dealing with challenging situations or people.

This also helps staff to identify goals, while coming up with realistic pathways, strategies and timeframes to achieve those goals.

Outside of the office or away from the job site, learning also helps to keep our minds sharp and active, providing further long-term benefits for your personal life and wellbeing.

How Professional Develop Programs Help Organisations

As well as helping staff to take charge and direction of their career, there are obvious benefits for your organisation.

When you invest time and energy into your employees, they’re far more likely to be productive and high performing. This certainly makes for a better workplace culture, which in turn has a positive impact on your company’s reputation, results, and profits.

Fast-paced advancements in technology mean learning and development tools are always changing, offering us more options and more solutions all the time. But you can rest assured that your business won’t be left behind, as your employees will have the skill sets to keep up-to-date with industry advancements.

Professional development also assists knowledge sharing, as managers reclaim more of a mentoring role, passing on skills and knowledge to their teams, and in turn, the greater organization.

Monitoring Employee Performance through Training

So you’ve invested in professional development for your staff, through increased employee training. How do you know if you’re getting a good return on this investment?

That’s where performance monitoring comes in – you need to think about how you’re going to track employee performance.

Consider how you can measure improvements in staff skill levels. Technical skills can often be measured quite easily, in tangible figures and numbers. Productivity itself is a very good indicator of the success of your company’s training methods, allowing you to see if your training program has been effective.

In this way, professional development programs should aim to improve staff competencies and increase productivity, while helping employees set goals for their career.

You also want corporate training programs to help bridge any skills gap present in your organisation, helping to improve the gap between the skills your business wants and needs, and the skills your employees currently have.

Learn More About Monitoring Employee Professional Development

Need a little more help getting started with employee professional development programs?

The Monitoring Performance and Professional Development course looks at the process of assessing and improving work quality, through the creation of employee development programs.

This online course will help employers and managers understand the importance of planning professional development. You’ll learn how to analyse each team member’s past performance, to identify strengths and challenges before setting goals and plans for personal improvement.

You might also like to check out our tips for creating effective professional development programs. This article is full of helpful advice, to help make your learning and development programs even more effective for your staff.

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