Most organizations welcome new employees with targeted training, enabling them to quickly learn what they need to know to get started—but offer limited employee career development training beyond onboarding. By maintaining that new-job enthusiasm, you can focus your workforce on continuous learning and personalized career development, to everyone's benefit. Building a personalized learning path in your LMS for each new employee during onboarding can reinforce their enthusiasm for learning and extend it throughout their tenure. Mercer's "Global Talent Trends 2019" report found that 56% of surveyed employees expect their companies to provide personalized learning based on their level and career goals. Thriving employees, the report found, "are nearly four times more likely to work for a company that understands their unique skills and interests."
Train & retain top employees
Attention to professional development benefits the bottom line. LinkedIn Learning's "2019 Workplace Learning Report" revealed that employees whose companies invest in them are 94% more likely to stay. So the payoff of creating a culture of learning where employees can build their skill sets is twofold: In the short term, you build a more talented and efficient workforce; over the long term, you greatly reduce costly turnover. It can help you attract top talent, too. As the labor market tightens and technology innovations affect more jobs, a commitment to employee career development may provide the edge that helps your organization compete successfully for high performers.
Map each employee's learning journey
LMS tools can help learners and managers maintain a focus on employee career development through:
- Training in new tools that enable more efficient performance.
- Supporting learner success at "stretch" projects or cross-training them for other roles in the organization.
- Addressing knowledge gaps to move learners along their desired career paths.
- Providing leadership training for employees moving into executive roles.
A personalized approach to creating learning paths and tracking progress promotes professional growth in two ways. First, you can share your data with managers so they can create opportunities for their direct reports that match their ambitions. Also, this personalized approach empowers learners to take their careers by the horns to make their own decisions on how to grow within your organization.
Your LMS is the ticket to targeted training
Employee career development is centered in your LMS. It hosts in-house content and external content libraries, which provide relevant resources to learners. Custom LMS dashboards enable managers to gather and analyze data about learners' progress and performance. From here, managers can easily create reports aligned with business needs. An LMS can make it easy to deliver specific content to learners based on their department, group or role. Many LMS platforms also integrate with a wide range of networking and conferencing tools, facilitating collaboration. LMS-hosted curation spaces encourage learners to find or develop resources and share them with peers. Support for mobile and on-demand learning further fuels personalization, enabling employees to control where and when they learn. As employees' skills grow, their performance will improve, growing your business. Investing in your most valuable and unique resource by nurturing a learning culture is the best way to invest in the future of your company.
