How online training fits into professional development

Giving your employees opportunities to develop their professional skills is a win-win-win.

First, they see that you’re invested in their growth. Then, managers see an improvement in their work quality. And finally, the organization experiences a boost in employee happiness and productivity.

Building a professional development program used to be a costly undertaking. Sending employees to classroom training often involved hard costs, such as registration fees, hotels, mileage, and meals. And then there were the soft costs: stress and distraction. When employees were balancing their busy schedules to accommodate time away from their work or families, it was challenging for them to focus on learning new skills.

Fast-forward to today, where technology dramatically reduces the cost of delivering training. By swapping classroom training for online training, you can build and scale a sustainable professional development program that doesn’t blow your budget or put undue stress on learners or your organization. 

Here are some tips for finding the perfect fit for online training in your professional development program. 

Identify the skills to develop

What do your employees need to be able to do at the end of the day? As you’re thinking through what your professional development training should cover, it’s a good idea to identify the skills your people need to advance their careers and excel in their jobs. 

For instance, do your folks need to learn a new programming language to level up their careers, or do they need to have better communication skills? Or maybe they need to work on both? 

Understanding the specific skills your people need to develop will help you understand the scope of what you need to teach them. 

Gather content and resources

With a better understanding of the types of skills your training needs to focus on, you can gather content and resources to address them. At first, you’ll probably have a ton of material to choose from. But resist the urge to throw everything at your learners to see what sticks. That’s a recipe for overwhelming them—and potentially undermining their growth.

Instead, focus on the most helpful content. If you’re not an expert on a specific skill or topic, talk to a subject matter expert who is. Ask them what resources, videos, self-study books, or other materials they’ve found most helpful in developing their skills. You can link to these resources in your online course, or rework them into interactions, scenarios, and knowledge checks to help employees build their skills and their confidence.

Another option is to lean in on professionally designed learning content. Off-the-shelf online training content on popular business topics like communication skills or managing conflict are easy to find. But watch out! This content can often be expensive and costly to customize.

An even better option is to go with an all-inclusive training system like Rise. Rise includes modern, web-based course authoring and templates that make transforming static content into beautiful, interactive training easy. Most importantly, Rise gives you tons of ready-to-use content on popular business topics every organization needs. And when you’re ready to deliver your online training to your employees, Rise gives you features that let you deliver, track, report on, and analyze the effectiveness of your courses. 

There’s a lot to love about using online training as a key component of your professional development program. It empowers staff to develop critical skills on their schedule, helps managers grow the skills of their teams, and boosts the productivity of your entire organization. And using an all-inclusive training system like Rise can help you streamline the process of creating all kinds of online training by giving you robust, ready-made training content you can easily customize to meet your organization’s talent retention goals. Now that sounds like a win-win-win-WIN outcome your business leaders will love!

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