Learn From Top Organizations How To Leverage Professional Development

Public and private organizations are more heavily invested in offering learning and development initiatives to upskill and reskill their top professionals to meet emerging challenges. 

C-suite priorities such as addressing cybersecurity challenges, responding to investor calls for ESG prioritization, and reducing compliance costs have made learning and development initiatives essential to building more resilient and agile business units.

94% of employees would stay with a firm for longer if it invested in their learning and development. 

Top firms realize that it is far more valuable to focus on engaging and retaining their top performers than on seeking to train new professional teams. 

Learning and development are a priority due to the competitive business landscape commercial enterprises, non-governmental organizations, and municipal governments find themselves operating in.

Enhancing digital literacy and ensuring professional teams have the technical credentials to continue performing to the best of their abilities have top organizations thinking about how to more meaningfully deliver transformative professional development opportunities to reduce overall operational costs and improve business performance to increase revenues.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many professional divisions have been forced to radically rethink their business models, product development pipelines, and general operating practices to contend with shifting requirements from local, state, and federal authorities.

The pandemic was the perfect flashpoint and provided many organizations with unique insights into areas where employee skills gaps were creating negative outcomes and limiting business success. Survival and driving growth over the last two years has required a more agile approach to business and a renewed focus on supporting organizational health with intentional processes designed to activate and engage top performers. 

Organizations that have been unable to learn, engage in active play, evolve, and face tough doses of reality have struggled to survive the challenges that have unveiled the business landscape since the start of 2020.

Resilient organizations have come through the eye of the storm even more mission-focused and primed for success, while fragile teams watched egos brought down to earth by the harshness of market realities.

66% of organizations are actively working to better integrate learning and development opportunities to help reduce costs and drive better business performance outcomes.

In this article, learn more about how top organizations can work to achieve this.

Leverage Professional Development to Develop a More Resilient Organization

It’s essential for professional teams to harness the spirit of innovation and respond to the challenges they face in their respective industries by seeking to adapt and innovate—to drive a truly dynamic approach to business that reduces frailty and applies redundancy and fail-safes to ensure performance targets are met and exceeded.

Business divisions need to focus on improving the core competency of teams in a shifting digital landscape that requires teams to understand complex and nuanced best practices related to the realities of the shift to cloud-powered business services. 

Over the last several years, investment in cybersecurity has never been higher, with high-profile attacks forcing very pertinent discussions around the impact of data breaches, data loss, and corporate cyber espionage.

Many firms have developed ongoing digital literacy initiatives to improve executive knowledge of data science best practices to improve the ability to use the advanced analytics of artificial intelligence and machine learning and also protect against new forms of cyber threats. 

Areas of information technology are becoming more and more necessary for generalist professional teams, and many learning and development initiatives are underway around reskilling teams to more fully embrace the global shift to remote cloud-supported work.

Deliver Professional Development Initiatives to Support Business Strategy

Learning and development objectives should be focused on supporting improving business performance. One way to achieve this is to shift thinking around professional development opportunity KPIs in terms of driving engagement and shift to using metrics that better describe how learning opportunities are leading to demonstrated improvements in business performance.

To achieve optimal results, learning and development initiatives need to be presented in a culture of transparency and communication that helps teams to understand not only the what in terms of what is required of them but also the why and how as well. That context helps professional teams to see the value of training opportunities and take the initiative to assist their ability to reach successful targets. Ideally, activated employees will take the new knowledge they acquired during training sessions to solve problems and overcome persistent challenges.

T0 better align professional development opportunities with organizational development strategies, incorporate business metrics used by by-product sales and marketing teams for measuring things such as sales, improving quality, and leading to better results with customer service. When different divisions in your organization understand how their performance impacts the top and bottom-line performance targets, it helps to motivate and inspire greatness.

Consistently evaluate the success of current learning and development opportunities by constantly measuring success to evaluate that you are working to improve knowledge in areas leading to improved KPIs based on the business performance targets you have been focused on improving. Create constant organizational feedback loops that allow employees to continuously explore their behaviors and skills in a positive way learning how to improve inefficient and ineffective practices.

In Closing

All across the business landscape, top professional teams are considering how to upskill and reskill their staff members. 

Organizations are seeking to leverage corporate learning programs as the tip of the spear driving product innovation and market penetration. 

To achieve this, it’s essential for human resource teams to work cross-functionally to ensure that they are able to integrate business performance metrics and targets into professional development strategies. 

By working across business divisions, human resources are perfectly situated to integrate the different KPIs that different individual team members focus on. Take the initiative to offer professional development programs that align with your organization’s core business development strategy.