In addition to standard compliance training, it’s vital that organisations have specific professional development training available to its workforce.
This has many benefits:
- It keeps staff up to date in their chosen field
- Allows them to expand their professional skills into different areas
- Maintains a pathway for personal and professional growth
- Promotes loyalty
- Builds a more diverse and effective workforce
This helps keep your staff happy as it gives them growth potential and it also gives you more scope to fill vacant positions from within the organisation.
In the current working environment, quality staff members are looking for self-improvement and this can be achieved a number of different ways. When an organisation shows its willingness to assist its staff with professional development, employee satisfaction grows to higher levels than if they have to look to others outside your organisation for this help.
Identifying the type of Professional Development required for your workforce is important. The best way to start is by identifying and creating competency mapping for your organisation. In essence, if you are able to supply the training required for each competency whether it be in-house or external, as long as you can automate the process and make it available for your workforce, then you can use this training to give employees a learning pathway or Professional Development training.
Let’s look at a simple example of this and then create a scenario.
Example
Jim works in the warehouse as a general storeman and really enjoys the organisation he works for but is looking to upskill himself as he doesn’t always want to be a storeman. Jim talks to his immediate boss Tina, the company’s warehouse superior about wanting to improve his skills professionally.
Scenario 1.
Tina listens to Jim but does not have any competency mapping or training pathways available in the company to offer Jim. Even though Tina wants to assist Jim, her only option is to explain that he will need to have a think about what he wants to do in the future and to upskill himself. Jim is grateful for Tina’s advice and decides to take an external course in warehouse management. During this training, Jim meets a number of contacts, one of which offers the opportunity to apply for a job as a warehouse superior in a different firm. Jim gets the job and starts his new employment. Tina is left to find a new employee and now has to provide training to get the newbie up to the level of former employee, Jim.
Scenario 2.
Tina listens to Jim and discusses with him the professional development training on offer by the company. Once she discovers he wants to become a warehouse supervisor, she discusses the competency mapping and training pathways available to Jim via company training. Jim is grateful for Tina’s advice and decides on the appropriate training and courses mapped out by the company to become a warehouse supervisor. While Jim is completing his training, a position comes up in another warehouse owned by the same company he currently works for. Via the learning platform his employer has in place, the recruiter sees that Jim has almost completely fulfilled the minimum competency standards required by the company for that role. Jim is offered an interview and with a glowing reference from Tina, Jim remains with the company and feels a sense of loyalty as they have helped him achieve his current desire of self-improvement through the company’s own professional development offering.