Training | By Summer Wilde | Read time minutes
Many business owners make a key mistake when looking to hire to fill business needs: always opting to recruit outside professionals rather than training internal employees to become the professionals needed. The big problem with that mistake is that it drives employees who feel like they're not growing career-wise to look elsewhere for growth opportunities. Recruiting new hands is not a bad idea per se, but it's also not always cost-effective to recruit new staff. Some of that money can instead be spent on making existing employees happy through training and development programmes.
Effectively managing your organisation's talent is ultimately vital to organisational success. While good talent management undoubtedly takes time, you can pull it off with careful planning and significant investment. Here are 5 ways that online training can help you improve your talent management.
1. Gives Employees Real-World Experiences
A key advantage of online training is that it gives your employees experience with real-world problems - without all the risks, potentially costly mistakes, trial and error, frustration, and stress. Real-world experience is usually difficult to achieve without such issues.
With online training, however, employees can actively engage in simulations and other interactive activities that offer learning points from business mistakes all over the world. Such trainings will allow employees to see what works and how the mistakes happened. And in the process, employees can identify personal areas for improvement and then continually develop talents.
2. Helps Retain Top Talent with Personalised Training Resources
Your existing employees would be elated at any opportunity to develop new skill sets that will help them at work. When you can make employees happy in this regard, it becomes much easier to retain such staff. Any employee would love to be at a place where they're treated as important and inclusive to the company's success.
In modern business, one-size-fits-all training doesn't work in the competitive world. In fact, most companies lose top talent to fierce competitors for this simple reason. Ensuring your top talents or performers have constant access to online training tools and any resources needed is essential to retaining your top talent and ensuring effective talent management.
3. Allows You to Easily Add More Talent to Your Team
Online reviews about how a company is faring aren't hard to find, and that's especially true for details about staff welfare. This aspect of employee welfare includes how their careers are developed regularly via the company's online training resources. Most top-notch prospective employees are constantly on the lookout for companies with high positive reviews.
For example, a prospective employee with extraordinary soft skills and a desire to become a professional project manager would love to join a programme that organises PMP training online for existing employees. PMP training improves an employee's leadership skills and gives them the knowledge to manage teams on key projects. These courses are normally pricey, so prospective new talent wanting to advance will see it as an advantage to complete such training for free. Plus, if the company is known to train employees via high-profile courses, you'll have an easier time onboarding other intelligent prospects, further improving talent management.
4. Facilitates Consistency and Standardisation
Online training also helps facilitate consistency and standardisation. A topic can be taught in different ways, especially with on-site instructors. Those listening to different facilitators will be taught in a way that makes consistency difficult in the application of learning points over the years. The need for that consistency and standardisation in working style and the way duties are discharged is what online training seeks to fix.
Once you put in the work to create an eLearning course, all your employees who complete the same high-quality training will be applying the same steps to work in the office. This consistency will help with your talent management in the sense that employees can easily cover others who might be tasked with another duty or unavoidably absent.
5. Provides 24/7 Access and Immediate, Personalised Feedback
Online training platforms are programmed to be available 24/7, giving employees access to online training material to improve their productivity at any time. Another way this easy access can help with talent management is via the provision of immediate personalised feedback after any training.
With physical instructors, the above process would be a one-on-one thing with every employee trained, which could be challenging with high numbers of employees in the same training session. This challenge could even make your company cut down on the number of employees that even get training. In comparison, online training can accommodate as many staff as your company wants to train - ensuring more effective talent management.
Final Word
Online training has several advantages. It improves workplace productivity, which increases company profits. Assigned tasks also get completed more professionally, and employee morale gets a significant boost. Plus, training employees in areas they want to be developed will help retain them - happy employees are much more likely to stick around. Above all, then, online training helps with talent management.
So don't make the mistake of always looking outside the company for talent. Instead, keep your performing employees happy while filling positions with top-class candidates already endeared to your online-training culture.
How do you recruit and retain top talent? Let's have a discussion in the forum.
Recommended read: Top 10 Benefits to Earning a Certification, by John Reiling.