Top Strategies for Employee Education Development in 2021

Let’s face it, doing more with less has been an ongoing theme in business for longer than anyone cares to remember. Being resourceful is what Human Resources is all about through developing managers, staff, and teams to improve outcomes and reach organizational goals. Let’s take a look at how to do more with your organization’s human resources in 2021 through professional development and education. If your company has not yet embraced digital training, now is the time to start. New technology solutions open the door for innovative ways to provide professional development and training to an organization with a diverse set of skills - whether they are working in the office, from home, or on a job site.

First and foremost, evaluate the skills and education necessary for each employee to meet the expectations of their positions. Responsibilities and tasks can change with the overall organization’s goals. Have top-level managers review goals for 2021 and meet with team leaders to communicate expectations. Mid-level managers can work with human resources to review their teams’ strengths and areas for improvement. Managers should also review individual employee objectives and key outcomes to determine gaps in skills and knowledge. Changes happen quickly in business and too often, companies do not recognize that employees should be provided with ongoing development. Employees too, share the responsibility to continue to learn and strive for personal improvement.

Regardless of the type of organization, there are basic areas of education that improve processes and people. They include courses on communication skills, conflict resolution, leadership, stress management, successful team building, and customer service.

Learning management systems have advanced in recent years and make it easier for human resources to onboard, educate, and stay current with the safety, ethics, and compliance education necessary in the workplace. Courses cover diversity and inclusion, sexual harassment, and preventing age or religious discrimination. For managers and human resources, there are courses designed to facilitate performance and offer a positive workplace environment. Examples include the legal aspects of interviewing and hiring, avoiding wrongful termination, employee discipline for managers and supervisors, ethics and code of conduct, code of conduct for government contractors, data privacy, avoiding conflicts of interest, and many more. Be sure your organization is, at the very least, covering the basic compliance issues.

Health and safety courses that cover a wide range of issues are essential for employers to reduce the risk of legal exposure and for employees to reduce the risk of injury. These courses may include back injury prevention, controlling exposure to bloodborne pathogens, COVID-19 and returning to work, defensive driving, chemical hazard communications, electrical safety, ergonomics for healthy office workers, DOT labeling and shipping, and managing substance abuse in the workplace. There are dozens of courses designed to address your company’s specific industry and its employees.

Professional, career-focused education can also be delivered digitally. Robust manager and leadership development paths can be designed with courses that cover everything from management basics, maximizing employee performance, to leading high-performance teams, negotiation, and selling.

There are many different ways to deliver digital courses. Talk to the experts at LightWork® Software about a learning management system for your organization. LightWork Learning Management, powered by dialog EDU, is a unique technology that provides digital and personalized education in an engaging online classroom. It features interactive content, simulation tools, and a suite of features that create a custom-targeted learning plan to improve learner outcomes. These outcomes can be reliably measured by the employer through assessments, feedback, and additional learner data, allowing for continuous improvement of the course material and structure.

Another feature of this dynamic learning platform is that it can be applied to create virtual online conferences for information sharing, telemedicine patient training, or traditional online learning models. This flexible solution is intuitive, secure, and scalable and the multilingual SaaS platform is available 24/7 globally. To learn more about LightWork Learning Management visit www.LightWorkSoftware.com.