Training can lead to strong job performance, but it doesn’t always lead to employee engagement. Understanding how employee training and employee development differ can inform how to best provide enriching opportunities for staff that will enhance long-term retention and a deep sense of connection to the company.
Employee Training: Go Mobile and Be Efficient
What we call "training" is the essential early phase of becoming comfortable in a new role at a company. Through learning and skill building, a new employee is able to take on the duties of the job description and practice scenarios that will likely occur in their everyday work life. Only 28 percent of Millennials say that their current organizations are making “full use” of their skills, according to the Deloitte 2015 Millennial Survey. Training a workforce raised with technology can translate into a need for instant application of those learned skills and a desire for timely supervisor feedback. Going mobile with training process can motivate employees to learn and directly apply skills to new tasks in real time.
Supervisors commit more time during the onboarding stage in order to correct mistakes, offer feedback, and troubleshoot solutions to challenges that the new employee might experience. Training requires a high level of time and energy up front in order to increase operational performance in the long run. This phase often begins with an employee orientation program that includes information about policies, procedures, and organizational structure of the workplace.
Employee Development: Set Long-Term Employee Goals
Employee development is the next level of investment, which enhances big picture reasoning and visioning skills for the worker and deepens their relationship with the institution’s values. Development can be self-driven by the passion of the employee to learn more about a certain topic of interest or in part of ongoing career pathing and career development plan. This can lead to a richer feeling of engagement in their job and a sense of empowerment to build on the skills they've already mastered. The support and guidance of a supervisor are valuable during this phase.
Positive employee engagement manifests in the workplace as staff who are invested in the larger goals of the company, but who also believe in the value of their individual role. Development can lead to that sense of enjoyment in work through long-term career skill building. An empowered employee is more likely to stay in their role longer, while giving back to the company’s culture and maintaining a high productivity level.
The lines between training, development, and engagement might be blurred at times but ultimately the more energy put into the early training phase, the more passion employees will invest in their career development. Empowering employees to take their professional development into their own hands will result in gains for the institution and meaningful enrichment for the individual. Providing the training tools for continual skill refinement which immediately benefits projects already underway will also be a worthwhile investment for the company (our latest eBook Moderinze Your Business Operations has some great resources). Once you commit to supporting their training and development, your staff will thank you.
How is employee training and development important to your organization?
