Employee professional development is crucial if your organization wants to be competitive and profitable. While professional development ensures your employees can learn and grow, it also has significant benefits for your organization.

The more opportunities employees have to grow, the more they can improve their efficiency and productivity, leading to more effective ways of working, more innovation, and an overall happier and more satisfied workforce. Ultimately, this will contribute to your organization being more profitable.

Accordingly, we’ll explore how your organization can leverage personal development to become more profitable, including how professional development improves performance and how you can better understand learning ROI.

How can you understand the value of professional development?

The value of professional development can’t be overstated. Providing your employees with the tools, resources, and time they need to develop may come at a cost, but ROI for learning and development can be substantial.

Consider the following points to see  how much value professional development holds:

It provides your employees with new skills and knowledge that align with both their goals and the goals of your organization.

It improves the performance of employees across your organization.

It creates a culture of learning and development.

It showcases that your organization values its employees. 

It offers you more opportunities for career advancement and internal mobility, thereby reducing the need for expensive and lengthy recruitment processes.

Adopting a growth mindset motivates employees to proactively develop themselves.

It improves your organization’s flexibility and adaptability.

How does developing your employees allow your organization to become more profitable?

Professional development has numerous benefits for both employees and your business. To summarize, the benefits for employees include:

Improves morale, job satisfaction, and wellbeing

Offers more opportunities for progression

Ensures your business can adapt to a fast-paced landscape

Allows your business to offer new products and services

Allows your business to recruit and retain top industry talent

As such, the benefits of professional development lead to both lower costs and higher revenue, meaning your organization can become more competitive, more successful, and more profitable.

How does workplace learning improve performance?

The more an employee knows and the more refined their skills are, the better they’ll perform.

In 2019, the International Journal of Business and Management Research found that 90% of employees agree or strongly agree that training and development programs improve their job performance. Similarly, a 2023 report from LinkedIn revealed that 94% of employees would stay with their employer longer if they invested in their development.

It’s hard to argue with stats like these. When businesses offer their employees more opportunities to develop, employees feel more valued, more confident and are less likely to seek roles elsewhere. As a result, employees will use their continued progression and skills to deliver better results and reduce costs.

Highlighting that training leads to better performance is one thing, but how do you calculate the ROI of your learning and development program?

The quick answer is to work out the percentage using a simple calculation:

ROI = (total benefits - total costs) / cost of learning * 100

For example, if you work out that your training has directly led to $5,000 of additional revenue off the back of training that cost $3,000, it would work out as this:

As a result, you could work out that the return on investment was 67%.

However, the ROI of training goes way beyond this simple calculation. The following points should also be considered when measuring the true ROI of your professional development program:

Set clear and measurable objectives beyond revenue, such as customer satisfaction scores, average order value, and timescales.

The impact on retention and the money saved on recruitment. A study found that hiring an employee costs an average of $7,645.

Establish business-wide KPIs, such as conversion rates. 

Collate and organize relevant data regularly to ensure you can refine training strategies where necessary.

Calculate wider development costs, such as materials, time, and technology.

Consider the cost-saving benefits, including increased innovation and productivity.

For further reading, check out our blog posts on how to calculate the ROI of your LMS and improving ROI metrics to showcase L&D’s value.

It can be easy to assume that all types of training will positively impact employee performance, but this might not always be the case. As we’ve highlighted, your employee development strategy must align with the overall goals of your business. If it doesn’t, you may be upskilling employees in areas that don’t directly impact their performance in the relevant areas. As such, your ROI will suffer. 

Additionally, measuring the ROI of training increases transparency, which allows you to adjust your learning and development program to benefit employees and your business.

What’s more, personalized learning at scale is a vital part of creating an effective L&D strategy. That way, your employees will be more engaged, and your business can improve in different ways that drive continued success. Having data that demonstrates the impact and ROI of training justifies this crucial investment and ensures continued cooperation with key stakeholders.

At Go1, we work with leading learning providers to offer a vast library of online courses that you can utilize as part of your learning and development strategy.

Download our 50 tips for increasing L&D business value, or speak to one of our experts today to find out how we can help your organization build a culture of learning.

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We’ll explore how your organization can leverage personal development to become more profitable, including how professional development improves performance.

How to leverage professional development to become a more profitable organization

In today’s fast-paced workplace, employees can find it difficult to dedicate time to learning and development. However, this is counter-productive. Not only does failing to dedicate time to L&D stagnate employee growth, but it also stagnates business growth. When employees can't learn new skills and develop their knowledge, they can’t improve their performance. 

However, one convenient, accessible, and low-pressure way employees can develop is through micro-credentials. Learning through short, easily digestible sessions ensures employees continue to grow without adding unnecessary stress and intensive additional workloads.

Accordingly, we’ll explore the benefits of micro-credentials, including some of the most popular micro-credential topics and how you can introduce this effective learning technique to your organization.

Micro-credentials are short, accessible credentials that allow an employee to learn a skill or piece of information. Rather than a long and detailed course that covers numerous topics, micro-credentials cover a specific topic in an accessible way. Over time, when an employee obtains several micro-credentials, it will contribute to learning valuable new skills that they can apply at your organization.

What are the benefits of micro-credentials?

Micro-credentials offer busy employees a flexible and convenient way to learn and develop. Below are some of the benefits of micro-credentials.

Employees can learn specific skills that align with the goals of your organization.

Employees learn in bite-sized chunks that increase engagement and retention.

They ensure employees aren’t overwhelmed with daunting workloads that seem unachievable.

They are valuable when developing personalized learning at scale.

They ensure you can evolve with industry trends by providing reactive training quickly and easily.

They build a culture of learning in your organization.

They help increase productivity, efficiency, and confidence, ensuring your employees can provide better service.

They help employees feel more valued and can lead to lower employee turnover.

How to align micro-credentials with your organization's goals 

While micro-credentials offer the flexibility and convenience employees need to learn, it’s also important to ensure they align with your organization’s goals. Here are some steps your business can take to ensure the two are synced.

Understand what skills your employees need to meet organizational goals and objectives.

Perform a skills gap analysis to identify which skills your employees need to develop.

Use data as part of employee reviews to understand how employees can improve.

Identify which micro-credentials align with skills gaps, employee goals, and organizational objectives.

Build micro-credentials into employees’ development goals.

Communicate the value of micro-credentials and how they contribute to employee growth and the overall success of your business.

Offer incentives and gamification to increase employee engagement.

Ensure employees have the opportunity to use the skills and knowledge they learn.

What are common micro-credentials employees can gain?

One of the main advantages of micro-credentials is that they are available across a wide range of topics. Some of the most common micro-credentials your employees can gain include:

Technical skills, such as software development and data analysis

Software skills, such as Microsoft Excel and Word

Project management skills, such as organization, planning, and risk management

Communication skills, such as presentation skills and teamwork

Leadership skills, such as delegation, team building, and conflict resolution

Customer service skills, such as problem-solving and active listening

Sales skills, such as negotiation and relationship building

Diversity and inclusion, such as how to build an inclusive workplace

Soft skills, such as time management, emotional intelligence, and resilience

Industry-specific knowledge, such as compliance training

Health and safety knowledge, such as first aid and fire safety

What are the challenges of micro-credentials?

Micro-credentials allow for a greater level of accessibility, flexibility, and convenience. As a result, courses are divided into manageable chunks that don’t overwhelm employees. This can give some stakeholders the impression that micro-credentials don’t offer the same depth as other courses. However, this isn’t the case.

Similarly, because so many micro-credentials are available, it can be hard to know where to start. Following the above steps can help your organization identify which skills your employees would benefit from developing first.

Because micro-credentials aren’t considered a ‘traditional’ way of learning, it may also be challenging for some organizations to accept the validity of certain courses.

How can you utilize micro-credentials in your organization?

You likely already provide your employees with resources, courses, and materials that allow them to develop. So, introducing micro-credentials shouldn’t require major changes to your existing learning and development strategy, as it simply offers a new way of learning that fits into what you’re already doing.

Micro-credentials can integrate with your learning management system (LMS) so employees can access training when convenient. You can also view how employees engage with their training and if they need additional support.

Because micro-credentials are more accessible, employees are more likely to engage and are in a better position to upskill. This also allows your business to recognize achievements more regularly, enhancing your reputation as an employer that values development.

At Go1, we have a range of online courses for your micro-credentials strategy. For more information on how Go1 can support your learning and development program, speak to one of our experts today. Or, download our 5 essential tools to help you develop a future-fit organization.

We’ll explore the benefits of micro-credentials, including some of the most popular micro-credential topics and how you can introduce this effective learning technique to your organization.

How to use micro-credentials in employee learning and development

Implementing a new learning management system (LMS) in your organization can have its fair share of challenges. Without thorough preparation and planning, these challenges can spiral into issues that can slow down the implementation process, costing you time and money and stagnating your employees’ growth.

However, with a well-thought-out approach, you can ensure a smooth onboarding process. So, we’ll analyze the steps your organization can take to reduce friction when onboarding a new LMS to ensure there’s no disruption to your learning and development program.

What potential challenges are there when implementing a new LMS?

There are several challenges your business can face when implementing a new LMS. These challenges can occur at various stages of the process. Consider the below examples:

Stakeholders disagree on what they need from an LMS. 

The LMS doesn’t align with the organization's changing needs. For example, it doesn’t have the right level of flexibility or scalability.

The LMS isn’t compatible with existing programs and can’t be integrated with the organization’s existing systems.

The LMS doesn’t meet the business’ customization needs, such as branding and permissions.

Data cannot be migrated from the existing LMS to the new one.

Users don’t have the necessary resources and training to feel confident using the LMS.

The LMS isn’t user-friendly or intuitive.

The LMS isn’t accessible on mobile devices or by remote staff.

Leaders haven’t communicated the benefits of the new LMS across the organization.

The organization doesn’t ask users for feedback to improve their experience.

Time isn’t allocated for continuous improvement.

Future updates to the LMS aren’t considered, leading to downtime. 

How to prevent issues from arising when implementing an LMS

The above are just some of the issues that can arise when implementing a new LMS. However, there are steps you can take to ensure a smooth onboarding process.

Before implementation, ensure that your chosen LMS meets your organization’s needs. This may sound straightforward, but many businesses stumble at this initial hurdle. Ensure key stakeholders have input early on and that their input aligns with your goals, requirements, and expectations.

Once you have chosen your LMS, create a plan that outlines every stage of the implementation process. For more detailed information on how to do this, read our guide on creating an LMS implementation project plan.

Keep communication open, regular, and honest

Throughout the implementation process, you must keep communication open, regular, and honest. Doing so encourages the implementation team to share their thoughts and concerns and identify potential problems before they arise. What may spiral into a significant issue later could be prevented if addressed early.

To learn more, check out our blog post on what to include in your communications plan when launching your new LMS.

Data migration can be a major stumbling block when implementing a new LMS. Streamlining this part of the process will prevent issues that could stall the entire implementation. To do this, consider the following steps:

Assess your existing data and content to identify what needs to be migrated and what can be deleted.

Ensure data is formatted correctly so it’s compatible with your new LMS.

Create a plan outlining the steps of the migration – including timelines. Divide your plan into small steps with realistic goals, especially when migrating large amounts of data.

Data mapping will ensure data is transferred correctly. Check each LMS before the migration to ensure any differences are accounted for so you can make the necessary adjustments.

Test the migration beforehand with sample data to identify potential issues.

Migrate in batches, starting with your most important data. This will help with monitoring, allowing you to identify issues quickly.

Continuously verify that data has migrated correctly and undertake regular testing. For instance, testing any integrations with programs and systems.

A partial integration can provide a smooth transition from one LMS to another, allowing for less intensive data migration, greater flexibility, and more customization. It can also also ensure you can test thoroughly to identify possible challenges. 

Further, a partial integration can minimize disruptions and introduce the new LMS to users in stages without overwhelming them.

Another common pain point when implementing a new LMS is user adoption and resistance. Providing thorough training ensures your workforce will use your LMS, allowing you to build a culture of learning. Communicating the benefits of an LMS will help employees see why this change was necessary to improve their knowledge and skills, so both employees and the business can thrive.

Despite thorough planning and following the above suggestions, challenges will inevitably arise when implementing a new LMS. You won’t be able to anticipate some of these challenges without asking for user feedback. Asking for user feedback allows you to fix blockers so more employees can utilize your new LMS.

At Go1, we have a database of eLearning courses that can support your organization’s learning and development strategy. Go1 integrates with hundreds of LMS’ so you can provide effective training to your entire workforce.

Speak to one of our experts today to see how we can help, and download our 5 new thinking habits for a smarter, stronger L&D. Or, book a demo to find out how Go1 can help with your team’s learning needs.

We’ll analyze the steps your organization can take to reduce friction when onboarding a new LMS to ensure there’s no disruption to your learning and development program.

How to reduce onboarding friction when implementing a new LMS 

As the world’s content expert, Go1 is committed to aggregating, curating, and maintaining the largest library of high-quality learning content. That’s why we intentionally partner with top-tier content providers and follow a meticulous content selection process to meet our customers’ needs. Together, we establish strong alliances and continually update our library based on consumption data and customer feedback. 

Learn more about our content curation process and the latest updates to our library below. 

Our content selection process ensures we choose only the most valuable content providers and courses to add to our world-class library. We partner with many renowned brands, like Coursera, Pluralsight, and Harvard ManageMentor, each of which adds industry expertise to our library. We also collaborate with boutique content providers that contribute a wealth of domain-specific knowledge and diverse perspectives.  

To ensure we bring in high-quality content, we utilize an assessment framework and evaluate content quality using the following five criteria: 

Rich metadata: Content must have sufficient metadata to be categorized for easy discovery. 

Playability standards: Content should have an embedded playback experience to enable a simple, accessible learning process. 

Comprehensive topic coverage: Content should contribute to our library’s wide range of subjects across many disciplines and industries. 

Language variety: Content should be available in multiple languages or add language variety to our library to cater to a global audience. 

High-quality user experience: Content should be easy to use, intuitive, and engaging. 

Once a content partner is integrated into the Go1 ecosystem, we work with them to ensure our content offerings are consistently updated. Every month, we add approximately 1,000 new courses, sourced from both existing and new content providers, to our library. We understand that having access to up-to-date knowledge is a non-negotiable for our customers, which is why we ask our content providers to review their courses regularly. Any outdated or irrelevant content is then removed or updated. 

This month’s content updates: Pluralsight 

This month, we’re refreshing our content library with updates from Pluralsight. 

We’ve updated our Pluralsight offering to bring 150+ courses to the Go1 Premium library [1]. Pluralsight is a global content provider 100% dedicated to developing and growing the technology skills of today’s workforce. Pluralsight’s content on Go1 includes new, hands-on beginner and intermediate courses for learners who want to master foundational tech skills like cloud computing, cybersecurity, software development, AI, and more. We’ve also made improvements to the Pluralsight learning experience, as all Pluralsight content can now be accessed through an embedded streaming player rather than taking users outside their LMS. 

We hope these updates will create an even better experience for our customers and learners. Keep an eye out for more content updates in the future; until then, check out the Go1 library to view all available Pluralsight content. 

ChatGPT and Generative AI: The Big Picture 

[1] Pluralsight content is only available to Go1 Premium subscribers. 

For more insights, subscribe to the Go1 newsletter to stay on top of all the latest L&D trends. Or, you can book a demo today to find out how Go1 can help with your team’s learning needs.

As part of our continual efforts to curate a world-class content library, we’re announcing updates to our Pluralsight content.

How Go1 curates and maintains a world class library

Organizations should understand the link between employee development and employee retention. When employees have room to grow and develop, it increases their job satisfaction and creates more career advancement opportunities, thereby reducing turnover.

However, you can improve employee retention further by using L&D data. Using data ensures your organization can create personalized development strategies so employees are more engaged, more productive, and have greater job satisfaction.

With this in mind, we’ll examine how you can use L&D data to enhance employee retention, including the steps your organization can take to use data you likely already collect. 

How does professional development support staff retention?

When businesses invest in the development of their people, it directly improves employee retention. A 2023 study by LinkedIn found that 94% of employees would stay with their employer longer if it invested in their learning and development.

But what are the reasons for this? Does it purely boil down to more opportunities for progression and salary increases? Not quite. While pay rises and bonuses are a big incentive to keep employees on board, there are plenty of other reasons to invest in employee L&D, including:

Creating new career progression opportunities

Helping your organization fill skills gaps

Helping employees achieve their professional goals

Building a culture of learning in your organization

These factors build loyalty to your organization and prevent frustration, anxiety, and burnout. In turn, employees are less likely to seek alternative employment.

What data should you use to understand the effectiveness of your learning and development program?

Creating an effective learning and development program that your employees engage with shouldn’t be a trial-and-error process. Doing this prevents your L&D strategy from being as effective as possible, meaning growth and development stagnate.

Your organization should use L&D data to maximize the effectiveness of employee learning. And the good news is that you likely collate this data already, such as reports you can generate through your learning management system (LMS) and data related to:

Depending on the type of learning your employees have focussed on, you may also be able to use data related to customer feedback, sales targets, and revenue.

How can you use this data to improve employee retention?

Data is a valuable resource for improving employee development, which in turn improves employee retention. To do this, consider the following steps.

Collate data as soon as possible using your LMS, employee surveys, performance management tools, and other relevant systems. This type of data is likely something your organization already collects.

Analyze the data to identify any trends or patterns and gain insight into engagement and training ROI. There will likely be a crossover between engagement, learning outcomes, and employee retention data. Can you use this information to spot areas of improvement or opportunities to increase retention?

Create a personalized employee learning strategy

Use the above insights to create a personalized learning strategy. Personalized development plans at scale are an effective way to develop and upskill your workforce. These plans also ensure employees develop in ways that align with their goals and your overall business goals.

Introduce ways to increase L&D engagement

There are several ways you can increase engagement in your L&D program, including:

Promoting a culture of continuous learning

Building development into performance reviews

Providing learning materials in various formats

Rewards and recognition are an excellent way to enhance employee retention. For example, a study by Deloitte found that businesses with recognition cultures have 31% lower turnover rates. When used as an incentive to increase employee learning, rewards and recognition can positively impact both employees and your business.

Communicate the benefits of L&D to your workforce

It’s vital to communicate the benefits of learning and development with your employees beyond pay rises and career development. A culture of learning relies on transparency and communication. As such, you should focus on sharing successes and opportunities and offering employees the  resources they need to develop.

As well as using data to improve your employees’ learning and development strategies, you can also optimize your overall L&D program with data. Continuously assess what works and what doesn’t to make data-driven decisions that will maximize your team's chance of success.

To learn more, check out our blog post featuring five tips for long-term employee retention.

At Go1, we can support your business’ learning and development strategy through eLearning courses. We integrate with hundreds of LMS’, so you can use data to continuously refine your employees’ learning and growth. 

We’ll examine how you can use L&D data to enhance employee retention, including the steps your organization can take to use data you likely already collect. 

How to leverage L&D data to enhance employee retention

Ever wondered who keeps track of all the content in Go1’s expansive content library? Look no further than the content curation team, led by Head of Content Curation Shannon Herrera. 

Now an L&D expert, Shannon started her career in a different industry – banking. She spent 10 years working for Silicon Vally Bank (SVB), joking that “not everybody knew who Silicon Valley Bank was until about six months ago, but now everybody knows who they are!” 

Part of Shannon’s role at SVB involved training colleagues to use the bank’s systems, and she quickly fell in love with this aspect of her work. “Training was always something that I ended up doing as kind of the job on top of my job,” she said. “I found that the days that I got to train were the days that I really loved, and that was the part of my job that I was passionate about.” 

After discovering this passion, Shannon decided to go back to school and earn her master’s degree in instructional design. She completed her master’s program while working at SVB, then pivoted into L&D and got a job creating custom content for Fortune 500 companies. Shannon worked in this role for more than three years – and then the pandemic hit. 

“I joke that the pandemic hit and I got a headhunter call and it was like, I could either talk to a headhunter or bake bread,” Shannon said. “And so I took the headhunter call really early in the pandemic. I started with Go1 on May 5, 2020.” 

Shannon started in an individual contributor role at Go1, then moved into a manager role. Now, Shannon leads the content curation team who, she says, are “the expert librarians of Go1.”  

The content curation team is made up of L&D professionals with diverse backgrounds. Some have worked as teachers, while others have backgrounds in information science. “Their experiences are quite different, and their skillsets are really different, which is such a valuable thing on a team,” Shannon said. 

As Go1’s expert librarians, Shannon’s team acts as the source of truth about all things content. They’re Go1’s internal content consultants, collaborating with marketing, product, customer experience, and other teams to ensure all communications regarding content accurately reflect the Go1 library. Content curation also plays an integral role in the sales process as they work with salespeople to help meet prospects’ content goals and build learning plans, playlists, and competency maps for new and current customers. In addition to these responsibilities, the team also creates thought leadership pieces that can be used by sales to help them better serve prospects and customers. 

When asked to describe her team, Shannon said they are, first and foremost, helpful. “They like helping other people and they like it when other people are succeeding,” she said. “All of them get personal satisfaction seeing the deals closed that they're a part of and seeing that playlists are being utilized. It's really about building other people up.” 

Shannon also finds joy in helping others. In fact, it’s what drew her to L&D in the first place. “The thing that I like about L&D is helping people find their ‘aha’ moments – those things that kind of click,” she said. “Whether that's helping them do their job better or being able to meet a customer request, that's the thing that brings me personal joy at work. And in this role, I get a lot of opportunities to do that.” 

While Shannon’s role has provided plenty of personal fulfillment, she has also learned a lot from it. Go1 has helped Shannon challenge her assumptions about what makes content good. “I created training for an agency and we had a very strict... way we [did] things,” she recounted. “We thought we were the best and we would tell everybody that we were the best.” 

“It was interesting coming here and getting more perspective on what customers were actually consuming versus what I would have deemed as ‘good,’” Shannon said. “Hearing customers say, ‘My entry-level employees only have this much time per day, and they're gonna have to be in an open space taking this training. What kind of training do you have that is really quick, like less than 15 minutes?’ It's really expanded my mentality on what good is and how that can be really different depending on who that end learner is, versus this attitude of, all adult learners are the same.” 

Shannon’s openness to new perspectives enables her to stay curious in her role and challenge her assumptions. “We make a lot of assumptions about who our customers are and what they need and what they're doing,” she said. “It's good to check in on those assumptions, whether it's talking directly to customers or talking to our CSMs about what they're experiencing, getting more feedback on that.” 

By approaching her role with an attitude of openness and curiosity, Shannon finds she can try new things and experiment. For example, the content curation team found that when it came to choosing content for their teams, many customers simply didn’t know where to start. In response to this problem, Shannon’s team created “Skills for Business Success,” a tool that maps competencies that are consistent across most small to medium-sized businesses. While the content curation team spent a lot of time building the tool, they didn’t know how it would be received. “It was a gamble,” Shannon said. But the risk paid off. “It has been our most successful asset and we've gotten really great feedback on it.” 

Whether she’s helping customers meet their goals or educating colleagues about where and how to find content, Shannon loves that Go1 enables her to make a difference in people’s lives. “Making it so that [customers] feel more equipped for their jobs or maybe they're more prepared for a promotion – Go1 directly helps our customers do that for their employees,” Shannon said. “Go1 does good in the world, and I really like being a part of that.”  

We’re introducing you to our Head of Content Curation and giving you an inside look into content curation at Go1.