Continuing education is a topic that is near and dear to the Intellective team. You may remember our blog post about partnering with Udemy to provide our global team with more learning opportunities, but that’s not the only route your company can follow!
There are many benefits of encouraging continued education for the employees and for the employer. Did you know providing extra learning opportunities actually decreases workplace costs? Encouraging learning leads to reduced downtime with extra productivity, fewer mistakes that require an audit, and less employee turnover.
For team members, it also helps with career advancement, job security, and overall workplace satisfaction. This most notably benefits the millennial work force, which is famously concerned with feeling satisfied with the overall mission of their employer, as well as knowing they are viewed as an asset in the company culture.
Required Time/Stipends
Many companies require employees to spend X number of hours weekly, monthly, or quarterly developing skills related to their job. Enhancing skills keeps the employees up to date on technology and trends and allows them a break from the day to day routine of their jobs. This can be audited by requiring reports on what was learned, or receipts. Extra incentives can be provided to employees by providing a stipend, so that they can enjoy higher quality lessons and courses.
Online Courses
At Intellective, we are huge fans of Udemy and its extensive library of courses. The online format allows team members to pick and choose what to learn, as well as brush up on our content that we as a company have uploaded to the platform. If you’re looking for other options you can also look into Skillshare, Coursera, or LinkedIn Learning.
Advanced Degrees/ Tuition Reimbursement
Many technology moguls encourage employees to get advanced degrees, or even recruit from top of the line programs. One way to ensure your team is always up to date with best practices is to encourage them to go back to school. Tuition reimbursement allows employees to pick what type of program in which they’d like to enroll. Even if they do not want to embark on an MBA or something similar, they can pick up new skills in a certification program, or one-off classes to teach them new skills.
Conferences
Encourage your team members to go to conferences! Often, your company is already attending these events, but by sending more of your employees to events you create a bonding experience and learning experience all in one. Also, conferences get bonus points because the more employees attend, the more people you have sharing the information from the top speakers and classes, thus sharing the information around your company more effectively.
New Projects
If you have new or small projects to spare, it’s a good idea to give these to eager employees. It will help them develop skills both in and out of their wheelhouse, and allow them to break up the monotony of day to day activities. Also, encouraged collaboration gets more people on board, sharing information from across departments, which benefits everyone.
Inner Company Education (webinars, book clubs etc)
Lastly, company lead education is a great way to share information, pertaining to the company’s industry, and about your company. Consider making webinars the business creates mandatory viewing, encourage book clubs on texts that teach new skills, and create more opportunities for relaxed information sharing between teams. By integrating learning into everyday life, and making it not-stressful, more employees are likely to buy-in and participate. Who doesn’t love sharing the newest fact they learned on their commute that morning?
You can use any one of these options to encourage the building of skills in your workplace, or you may find a combo that better fits your company culture! A great way to see what would benefit your employees most would be to take a poll and see what they are the most interested in! Continued education programs are great, but if they are in a format that doesn’t meld well with your team, no one will use it.