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:

It develops employees’ skills and knowledge. 

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: 

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:

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?

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. 

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.

Use your learning management system (LMS) and create a collection of online courses, such as those provided by Go1.

Regularly recognize and reward employees’ learning achievements across your organization.

Encourage collaborative learning to improve engagement and retention.

Evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy using data, which will also allow you to understand the ROI of your training.

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.

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Foster a culture of continuous professional development by implementing effective training programs and encouraging employee feedback.

How to enable continuous professional development throughout your organization

In recent years, online learning has become more and more accessible and affordable. While this is a fantastic tool that businesses can utilize for personalized learning at scale, where does this leave professional development coaching?

In the modern business landscape, coaching still plays an important role in many L&D strategies. Coaching provides the support and guidance employees need to develop in a way that benefits both themselves and the organization.

So, we’ll explore why coaching should still be part of your organization’s learning and development plan, including how it can benefit your business, and how you can successfully implement professional development coaching. 

Understanding professional development coaching

Professional development coaching, also referred to as career coaching, is a way for businesses to support the development of their employees by offering one-on-one coaching. A professional development coach works with individual employees to help them identify what they want to achieve, when they want to achieve it, and how they can enact that plan. In the process, they learn valuable new skills and knowledge that push your business forward.

You can utilize coaching across your entire workforce, from entry-level employees who are still trying to work out their desired career path, to senior managers who know their goals but want to continue upskilling. Coaching is a collaborative process that requires a proactive approach from employees seeking to further their knowledge and skills. A coach is simply someone who will guide employees using a series of techniques, such as setting goals, encouraging self-reflection, and setting skill and knowledge-building exercises.

Coaches will help employees upskill in a range of areas, such as communication, time management, leadership skills, emotional intelligence, and decision-making. Each of these skills allows employees to grow, while also contributing to the overall success of your business.

While coaching is a one-on-one process, individual employees undertake most of the legwork. That means a coach can support a large organization with many employees looking to develop.

The importance of professional development coaching

Coaching can be a fantastic way to improve your organization’s learning and development plan. The benefits of coaching include:

Developing key skills such as leadership, decision-making, and communication

Ensuring employees feel valued and motivated

Encouraging employees to embrace change and be more flexible

From this, your organization will be in a better position to promote from within, which will prevent the need to recruit as regularly, saving you from long and expensive recruitment processes. It’ll also help you attract and retain top industry talent.

A coach will help build a learning culture in your organization, pushing your employees to be the best they can be. They will also encourage continuous learning, so employees never lose their enthusiasm and drive to learn and develop.

Of course, without utilizing a professional development coach as part of your L&D strategy, your employees can still use online learning and other tools to develop. However, a coach will guide employees to overcome challenges, improve their self-awareness, and get the most out of their learning and development. Coaching will help employees reach their potential and drive your organization to success.

For more information, read our post on why professional development is essential for future-ready organizations.

How professional development coaching enhances L&D

Coaching is a fantastic way to boost your organization’s learning and development strategy to ensure your employees develop in the most effective ways possible. This includes:

Personalized learning so employees can take control of their journey.

Application of learning so employees can utilize what they learn to increase retention.

A shift in mindset across the organization as you introduce a culture of continuous learning.

Implementing professional development coaching in your L&D strategy

To implement professional development coaching at your organization, consider the following steps:

Understand the goals you hope to achieve by implementing coaching. For example, do you want to improve communication throughout the organization, or focus on leadership development?

Ensure your business has the infrastructure to support coaching. Can you dedicate the resources necessary for it to be effective?

Speak to qualified coaches to find one that aligns with your goals, industry, experience, and values.

Identify which employees are most likely to benefit from coaching. 

Develop learning strategies that align with the overall goals of your organization.

Roll out the strategy and communicate the benefits to your workforce.

Provide the resources employees need so your L&D strategy can be as effective as possible, such as offering relevant online training courses to help employees upskill.

Ask employees for feedback so you can continuously tweak and improve your strategy.

Use metrics to measure the effectiveness of the strategy and ensure the goals you identified are closer to being achieved.

Real-world success stories of coaching in L&D

78% of LinkedIn’s top US companies utilize coaching to support careers, succession, and performance goals. One such company is Verizon, which found that: “99% of managers agree that coaching has improved new directors' impact on communication, executive presence and influence, resilience and change, team performance, and strategic thinking.”

LinkedIn’s data also revealed that Alphabet (Google’s parent company) offers a coaching strategy that prioritizes learning and development, which resulted in a 200% increase in participation in just two years.

Upskill your workforce with online courses from Go1

At Go1, we have a huge database of online courses to support your L&D strategy and upskill your workforce. For more information, download our free L&D playbook, or speak to one of our experts to find out how we can help you create a culture of continuous learning.

Tips for leveraging professional development coaching to enhance employee skills and drive business success.

What role should professional development coaching play in your L&D strategy?

Have you already created your compliance learning program to ensure your employees have taken all required courses by the end of the year? If not, there's still time! Below, we feature content providers and courses to help you meet your regulatory needs.  

What content providers should you check out this month?

Topic coverage: Sexual Harassment, Resilience, Diversity and Inclusion, Emotional Skills, Cross-Cultural Differences, Healthcare, Active Threat Response, Remote Working

15+ courses in Premium ranging from 30 to 132 minutes in duration

Compliance courses available in EN & ES (select ES within the course)

Engaging content with interactive scenario videos

Top courses: Common Ground: Sexual Harassment and Abusive Conduct Prevention, Unconscious Bias, Emotional Life Skills @ Work

Coming soon: new diversity and inclusion content!

Access Group (Compliance & Social Corporate Responsibility Library)

Topic coverage: Diversity & Inclusion, Financial Compliance, IT & Data Compliance, Sustainability, HR Compliance, Fraud, Competition Law

45+ courses in Premium ranging from 5 to 80 minutes in duration 

Top courses: Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Neurodiversity Awareness, Workplace Bullying, Budgeting Basics, Competition Law 

Topic Coverage: HR Compliance, Health and Safety, Ergonomics, Hospitality, Customer Service, Leadership, and Health and Wellbeing

73 courses in Premium, mostly 15-25 minutes, with a longer, comprehensive Compliance Suite 

Interactive microlearning courses with beautiful visuals and activities to engage learners

Top courses: Cyber Security, Anti-Money Laundering, EEO, and Bullying & Harassment

What new content providers have been added to the Content Hub?

Topic coverage: Leadership & Management, Personal Development, Diversity & Inclusion, Hybrid Teams, Problem Solving, Creativity, Innovation, Communication Skills, Managing Change, Influencing Skills, Finance, Performance Management

135+ courses in Premium, ranging from 5 to 215 minutes

Courses come in a variety of formats, including podcasts, interactive books, quizzes, infographics, and videos

Exciting new courses: Building a positive culture, Employee engagement, and Innovation and creativity

Topic coverage: Sexual Harassment, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI), Belonging, Trust, Social Justice, Equal Employment, Unconscious Bias, HR Compliance, Health and Safety, People and Communication Skills

110+ courses in Premium ranging from 2 to 120 minutes in duration

Emtrain courses are available in 35+ languages (machine translated), and voice narration is provided for 20 languages

Engaging compliance content serving all 50 states as well as global options

Exciting new courses: Preventing Workplace Harassment, Unconscious Bias, Diversity and Inclusion, Global Data Privacy, Equal Employment Opportunity

What great new content have our current content providers added to the Content Hub?

Packt added another 200 new technology courses (they added over 200 last month too!) as they continue to update their library with the latest technology content.

IsEazy added 165 soft skill courses in English and Spanish, including productivity, creativity, and negotiations.

Coorpacademy expanded its library with 57 courses in English, plus content in French, German, Spanish, and Italian.

I love exploring new content providers. This month, I took a few courses from Emtrain. Emtrain offers high-quality compliance and professional development content. Their courses are interactive and often include videos, as well as tip sheets to help you transfer the learning to your on-the-job experiences. I loved their Bringing A Different Perspective course, which showed examples of the right and wrong way to approach hearing different perspectives and provided concrete reasons why it’s important to hear those perspectives and steps to ensure you are doing it. 

In the August edition of the Go1 Content Insider, we feature content providers and courses to help you meet your regulatory needs.

The Go1 Content Insider - August 2023 edition

When examining professional development methods, it’s easy to focus solely on individual development goals. Some might even argue that learning new things and developing skills is an individual’s responsibility. However, without guidance and support from their organization, employees can’t reach their full potential. Accordingly, setting professional development goals must start at an organizational level. 

With this in mind, we’ll look at how to set professional development goals, and how these goals will result in improved performance for both your workforce and your organization as a whole. 

Understanding the importance of professional development goals

Professional development goals are vital for many reasons, including: 

Employee engagement and retention - Fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement will keep employees engaged and encourage them to invest in developing their skills. 

Being future-ready - It’s hard to name an industry that isn’t anticipating great change in the coming years. Committing to professional development at a company-wide level will ensure your organization and employees are continually learning and staying on top of industry trends.

Improved performance - Improved performance is the result of setting the right professional development goals and reaping the benefits of the results listed above, among others.

The impact of professional development on employee performance

Many professional development goals focus on learning new skills and enhancing existing skills. These goals are useful because, by adding to your employees’ skillsets, you will be rewarded for their enhanced abilities and performance. 

Additionally, some focus more directly on your employees’ wellbeing, such as mindfulness initiatives and health seminars. These goals will also positively impact employee performance, and, consequently, your organization’s overall health. 

Setting the stage: preparing for goal-setting

If you’re wondering where to start when setting your goals, here are some useful tips to keep in mind.

Assessing current skills to identify needs and gaps

Decide on how to assess your organization’s current strengths and weaknesses — this will vary depending on the nature of your organization. It makes more sense to develop an area in which your employees lack confidence, rather than adding to something at which they already excel. 

Aligning your goals to business objectives

Your development goals must complement and align with any pre-existing business objectives. For example, a manufacturing company whose objective is to become more efficient through lean thinking might set a goal of training its managerial team in lean methodology. 

Crafting effective professional development goals

You’ve identified an area of your organization that could benefit from professional development, and seen how this can align with your business objectives and benefit your employees. Now, the question becomes: how do you design effective professional development goals? 

The SMART framework is a useful tool to ensure your goals are appropriate and attainable. SMART stands for:

Specific - Your goals should be precise and easily understood.

Measurable - There should be a quantifiable way of measuring your goals.

Achievable - Your goals should be challenging yet realistic.

Relevant - Goals are only useful if they are relevant to your organization.

Time-bound - You should aim to achieve your goals within a specific timeframe.

Using this method will ensure your goals are manageable and achievable. 

Another thing to consider when crafting your goals is your employees’ aspirations and career paths. Your employees will be more likely to engage with professional development training when they can see how it benefits their personal growth. Conversely, you may find that they’re less likely to invest time and energy into topics and courses that aren’t relevant to their roles and goals.

Tools and resources for professional development

There is a wide variety of material available online to help you craft your professional development plan. Online learning is a great way to roll out your professional development goals, as it allows your workforce to fit training into their schedules on their terms. Our Content Hub is the world’s largest digital learning library and a great place to start looking for relevant courses and resources.

Implementing your goals and evaluating their success

After carefully crafting your professional development goals and rolling them out across your organization, it’s time to track their progress. While you may not be able to measure their impact on your overall business performance until a fair amount of time has passed, it should be simple to monitor the progress of your SMART goals. This is especially true when looking at well-chosen key performance indicators (KPIs).

Key performance indicators for professional development goals

Some examples of professional development KPIs:

Training completion rates - This indicates levels of employee engagement and commitment.

Career advancement - This measures how employees can advance their careers due to professional development.

Application of learning - This involves tracking how knowledge and skills gained from professional development are applied to projects and day-to-day tasks.

Feedback from your workforce is essential to understand the success of your professional development plan. You can collect feedback through open forum discussions or surveys. These forums should allow employees to air their opinions on your professional development methods.

If you’ve located areas where you can improve your professional development goals, you can corroborate this with feedback. Then, when adjusting your strategy, you can implement changes based on that feedback. This will ensure your employees feel heard and let them know their opinions are valued.

There’s no single right way to start your learning journey, but here at Go1, we have plenty of suggestions. If you’re starting from scratch, why not speak to an expert and find out where to begin? Or, if you already have a learning platform in place, see how we can integrate with your existing system to bolster your resources. 

If you think eLearning might be the way forward in your professional development plan, you can find out what you need to have in place before you get started by downloading our whitepaper. 

Setting professional development goals at an organizational level enhances employee engagement, boosts productivity, and drives business growth.

How to set professional development goals at an organizational level

Professional development is crucial to ensure your business stays competitive in an ever-changing landscape. However, as well as offering development opportunities for your employees, evaluating your development strategy is vital to ensure it is as effective as possible.

With the right approach, you can quickly discover what’s working for your professional development strategy and where there’s room for improvement. 

With this in mind, we'll explore why regular professional development evaluation should be a priority, including the steps you can take and how to leverage technology to your advantage.

What is the impact of professional development on employee performance?

Professional development plays a significant role in employee performance. Without professional development, your employees will never reach their full potential, and neither will your business.

Below are some of the ways professional development benefits employees and your business:

Aids with retention and attracting top talent

Ensures your business can adapt to industry changes and customer demands

Each of these points has a positive impact on employee performance. But, how can you demonstrate this impact to understand why professional development is so vital? 

For more information, check out our post on why professional development is essential for future-ready organizations.

Why is evaluating professional development important?

Providing your employees with development opportunities should only be one aspect of your L&D strategy. Another key part is measuring the effectiveness of your strategy and how you can improve it. By neglecting this part of the process, you risk:

Your development program not aligning with the overall goals of your organization.

Not having a clear understanding of how effective your development program is and whether it has improved employee performance.

Not being able to determine your program's return on investment (ROI) means you risk it not being as cost-effective as it should be.

By not identifying your organization's skill gaps, you risk not being able to deliver in ways that customers expect.

Employees not engaging with training materials and not retaining what they learn.

What steps should you take to evaluate professional development?

Below are the steps your organization can take to evaluate professional development.

1. Engage stakeholders and senior leadership

Ensure stakeholders and senior leaders are engaged in your learning and professional development strategies and regularly offer feedback. Your leadership team should also be actively involved in developing their skills to lead by example.

When stakeholders are involved throughout the process, it helps them understand the value of professional development across the organization.

2. Have a thorough understanding of the goals of professional development

Before evaluating your organization’s professional development plan, you should understand your professional development goals. These goals must align with the overall goals of your organization. Otherwise, the ROI won’t be as high as it should be.

Then, you can undertake a skills gap analysis to identify which skills your employees should develop. 

Set clear and measurable objectives so employees know what’s expected of them. These can include individual goals or business goals. These objectives will play a major role in the effectiveness of your strategy.

Examples of individual employee objectives include:

Complete a certification in a certain subject by a set date

To evaluate the effectiveness of professional development on the business, KPIs could include:

Course assessment scores or completion rate

Specific goals, such as increased average order value

ROI of professional development and training

Ensure your organization continuously collects data relevant to your development program. For an accurate evaluation, you will also need data from before any professional development occurred. You’ll be able to take much of the necessary data from your learning management system (LMS).

Measure your data against your original objectives and KPIs to assess the effectiveness of your program. There will be patterns and trends that align with your organization’s goals if your development strategy has been successful. From this, you’ll also be able to assess your program’s ROI.

6. Use your data to refine your professional development strategy

You can also use data to identify ways to improve your professional development strategy. Have you met certain objectives while others are still in progress? If so, can you repeat stages 2 and 3 using the data you’ve collated and analyzed? 

It’s also important to communicate the success of your plan across the organization. Acknowledging milestones and achievements will help employees see the value of continuous learning and development.

The role of feedback in professional development evaluation

You can collate useful data through your LMS and other learning systems, but feedback is another useful way to evaluate professional development. Feedback from employees, managers, and senior leaders will help you identify what works and where your strategy could improve.

This is important because while data could say one thing, the feedback from your workforce could indicate another. Asking for feedback will give you a complete picture and allow you to accurately evaluate your professional development strategy. 

At Go1, we have a huge range of courses to support your organization’s learning and development strategy. 

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 support your employees’ professional development.

Evaluate professional development across your organization by assessing the impact of your training programs and making informed decisions that drive business outcomes.

How to evaluate professional development across an organization

There are many benefits to implementing a learning management system (LMS) in your organization. LMS’ are centralized learning environments that are scalable and cost-effective. They offer unparalleled accessibility and flexibility, handy integration with other systems, and data-driven insights and tracking. 

You’re probably already on board with all these (and numerous other) features, but if you’re considering implementing a new LMS or you want to get the most out of your existing one, how should you proceed? That’s exactly what we’re going to examine here.

If you’re still not convinced an LMS is right for you, you might enjoy our blog on ‘7 benefits of learning management systems’. Otherwise, let’s get back to maximizing your investment and ensuring LMS ROI.

Unleashing the potential of a comprehensive learning library

The potential of your LMS lies largely in its expertly-created and curated content. After all, this is how your employees can continue their professional development. As such, it’s essential to have an intuitive LMS that gives you access to a comprehensive learning library full of relevant, up-to-date information and courses that meet your team’s learning needs. 

The diversity of Go1's learning resources

By investing in an LMS with Go1, you can access world-class content, upskill your workforce, and stay ahead in the digital age.