When your organization continues to grow and new tasks start appearing, you won’t just train new people. Instead, to cut costs and save time, the company will have to rely on some of their employees to learn new tricks, master new platforms and acquire new knowledge. To make this procedure simpler and more effective, learning and development (L&D) leaders will need to cultivate a continuous learning culture. In this article, we’ll evaluate some best practices to getting started with this.
How to Cultivate a Continuous Learning Culture
1. Lead by an example.
As a training professional, it’s important to train managers to lead by example. While leaders are busy people, so are their employees. Sending employees regular training and insisting they attend courses while leadership has “better” or “other” things to do will not send the right message. After all, it’s not like your leadership team doesn’t need to learn or improve, too.
The thing is that learning must be voluntary. We’re not talking about employees learning if they want to; instead, we’re referring to accepting this as a part of their duty instead of seeing it as something mandatory. As an L&D professional, it’s important to communicate that everyone can benefit from training — employees and leaders alike. Leadership persevering on this path of knowledge, and self-improvement can resonate strongly with your team.
2. Leverage AI coaching.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can assist in every step of the learning and development (L&D) process, from assessing the current state of your team’s expertise to being an active part of your AI coaching process.
AI coaching tools are great for providing personalized learning paths and allowing you to develop a far more accurate skill assessment of your employees. It can continuously monitor their progress down this learning path (in real-time) and allow you to make easy adjustments.
AI coaching can even assist your team in mentorship since it can help senior team members develop their mentoring skills more quickly and effectively. By learning to utilize these tools, they can also have an easier time adjusting their learning style to the person they’re mentoring.
All in all, these AI tools can give an unprecedented level of personalization to the learning experience, which can make it more interactive and immersive for learners. Both of these aspects can affect the learner’s intrinsic motivation and the process’s overall efficacy.
3. Everyone can use a sales course.
This may require a bit of buy-in from stakeholders, but, in reality, everyone needs sales skills to thrive. Even if you’re not selling a product, you’re selling an idea. Just think about it: Skills like communication, problem-solving and emotional intelligence (EI) can all be categorized as sales skills.
For example, a research and development employee can use sales skills to help with developing features to add unique selling proposition to the product. And customer service representatives can undergo the course to better understand customers’ expectations. Even as a creative or an artist, sales skills and knowing how to attract buyers to your product and/or service is incredibly imperative. Just think about it: Whenever you read the back of a book, you never encounter the phrase “best-writing” author — you only see the words best-selling.
4. Road mapping learners’ careers.
Have an open and honest conversation with your employees about their future and where they’d like to see themselves in the future. What kind of position do they want to work in? This can be helped with a career mobility program.
With upskilling and reskilling opportunities available, employees can acquire the career skills needed to make a lateral or vertical move in the company. This way, you can give employees a clear line of vision to their next promotion, while also maintain retention and filling much-needed roles in the organization.
Wrap Up
It’s all about giving your people a reason to want to learn. As L&D leaders, we must show our people that this is an investment — one can greatly benefit their careers. It’s also about putting into perspective how this can benefit them both personally and professionally.
No matter how loyal they are to your brand, your employees will always want to know what’s in it for them. To ensure that the organization can continue to grow and retain its knowledge base and employees, L&D leaders must use these best practices to cultivate a continuous learning culture.
