Following on from our recent article about professional development courses, we thought we’d give you some more great online training materials to help your team grow.

Something that we haven’t quite touched on yet is the need for professional development training to be continual – it’s not just something that you should tick off once a year to satisfy HR. It requires ongoing investment of your time, focus and energy, to get the best results.

Why? Because when you’re continually learning, you know that you’re always growing as a professional. And if you’re a manager, you should also be helping your employees to grow, and acquire the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

Making the commitment to check in with employees and set new goals is easy. The real challenge is getting them excited about their own professional development. That’s where these online courses come into the equation. We’ve hand-picked 5 short courses that we think will help get your team on board with online learning. They’re fresh, well-presented and easy to understand, with engaging content and delivery methods.

You and your team will explore decision making, branding, customer feedback and more. Without further ado, here they are!

Most of us work in teams, whether it’s in the office or on the sales floor. So when it comes to professional development, improving your skills as a team player is pretty much top of the list.

One of the challenges faced by many employees is knowing how to make decisions as part of a team. But when your decisions can have a positive or negative impact on other people, it’s important to get this right.

This first course will help you to understand effective decision making and the benefits of team collaboration. Making decisions as a team player creates a sense of empowerment and ownership, while also working to drive group motivation, creativity and innovation. As a manager, you’ll hopefully see an increase in team cohesion, and a reduction in individual stress levels for your employees as a result of that.

In the last course, we looked at team dynamics – now it’s time to take a good long look at yourself. What kind of image are you conveying at work? Like it or not, when it comes to your career, there’s something to be said for paying attention to your own personal brand.

This eLearning course will help you to better understand your brand. You’ll work through the steps of building your personal brand and communicating it to others, creating your own unique Personal Branding Statements and Leadership Profile. You’ll learn more about your core values and what you stand for, and how this has an impact on what people feel your brand represents.

There’s no question about the impact great customer service has on an organisation. And knowing how to successfully manage customer feedback is one of the best skills you can have as an employee.

This doesn’t just apply to people working in retail or hospitality roles. Your customers can also be internal, and it’s just as important to keep internal stakeholders or clients happy as it is with any customer base. You want to create an environment that welcomes customer feedback – even if it’s negative! Because as the course content reminds us, Bill Gates once said, “your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

This course will educate your team on how to handle feedback and use it to provide a better customer experience.

Developing a Strategy for Customer Complaints

Employees will also learn how to predict potential issues before they arise, helping them to feel more empowered in their roles.

Another valuable skill that is critical for professional developing is knowing how to manage team conflict.

Many people naturally tend to shy away from difficult conversations or conflict – if that’s you, you’re not alone! But unfortunately, avoiding conflict won’t make it go away. If anything, it will only make it worse, as negative emotions continue to boil under the surface and grow larger in magnitude.

When members of a team are in conflict, it can also begin to affect their other team mates, causing rifts and division and resulting in a toxic work culture. This eLearning course gets to the bottom of this, suggesting practical ways you can tackle conflict head on and tips for how to communicate and restore balance.

How to Create their 'Walk in the Door' Moments

While the above title might sound a little cryptic at first, this course is all about creating a positive work environment for yourself and your team.

It asks the big and important questions: “Why do you walk in the door every day?” “What motivates you in your workplace?” “What makes you want to be there?”

This course shows you how to create a culture of wellbeing in your workplace. You’ll learn how job satisfaction is closely linked to productivity, making it a vital part of career development. And you’ll explore ways to create and maintain a space that inspires and motivates team members to higher levels of performance and commitment.

While this course is part of the Learoy Tonight Leadership series, it’s useful for employees of all levels who are keen to work towards a better workplace for themselves and their colleagues. Your team members will get just as much out of the course materials, helping them get excited about professional development and online learning.

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Help your team grow with professional development training

All successful digital learning projects start with a first class plan. But, it’s easy to launch head first into creating learning content, without properly laying the foundations and understanding what success will look like.

The digital learning authors that invest a couple of hours in understanding their objectives and audience at the start of a project tend to get better results, much quicker. And those that prototype, test and iterate their ideas do even better.

What are the crucial steps to more successful elearning?

Taking the time to plan at the start of your project and reflect and refine throughout, will help make sure your learning hits the mark. There are various frameworks for elearning, that set out approaches to doing this. The 5C Framework is the new kid on the block and can be seen as a modern, more agile alternative to the ADDIE framework. 

4 crucial “Capture” questions to ask yourself at the start of your elearning project:

Who are your audience and what changes do you want them to make?

What does the digital learning need to do to help them with this change?

What resources do you have at your disposal to make your project a success?

Download this free “Capture Needs Template” to help with this.

Tips for nailing the “Capture” stage of the 5C Framework

Make time – block out 60 minutes for this planning, you’ll save this time later on and reach your goals faster.

Work collaboratively – bring your colleagues into the conversation about your project goals and audience needs. As they say, two heads (or more!) are better than one.

Ask your audience – if you’re unclear of what your learner needs actually are, or want to know what they would find engaging…ask them. If you use Elucidat, create a survey to send out to a small sample to get their feedback.

Print out and use the Capture Needs template – this will speed up your planning process and will guide you through the key questions to reflect on.

 Want to know more about the 5C Framework? Learn more here.

Kirstie is an experienced learning design and performance enhancement specialist at Elucidat. She has a passion for bringing about high impact, emotionally engaging digital and blended experiences that make an actual difference.

How to plan a more successful elearning project

One of the most important characteristics of great leaders is their ability to set clear paths for their teams, leading the way forward with direction and purpose. In fact, this strong sense of direction is not just desirable in leadership roles – it’s critical for the success of any business.

So what do we mean when we talk about direction, in an organisational context? It’s easy to pull out words like mission, vision and values, but what does it all mean when you really get down to it?

Well, when we’re talking about direction we’re talking about knowing:

And your company’s mission, vision and values are an incredibly important part of getting there! Establishing these things are what will help you establish a clear direction, setting your business up for success and giving your team purpose.

Let’s look closer at how leaders can set the direction of their organisation and drive positive outcomes for their team. And how you can strengthen your own sense of direction as a leader.

The Importance of Clear Direction for Employees 

As we said above, your organisation's mission, vision and values are all central to creating the direction (and potential success) of your business.

If you’re in a management or team leader role, you have the opportunity to create a more purpose-focused culture for your employees. When each individual team member knows what they are working towards, and how they fit into the big picture, they have a much stronger sense of being valued. This helps to create a more positive work culture and leads to higher levels of productivity and performance – happy employees, happy business!

As a leader, it’s important that you define and communicate this ‘big picture’ concept to your team, so that they know how their work fits into the organisation’s goals and mission. Ask yourself (and be honest) how many of your team members actually know the company’s vision and values – would they even know where to find this information?

If you’re eager to get your team back on track and moving forward in a more positive direction, you can get the ball rolling by working on your own leadership skills.

The online course, How to Succeed Through Direction, is a great place to start. With this short eLearning course, running for approximately 30 to 45 minutes, you’ll gain a wealth of leadership knowledge in less than an hour.

Through videos, interviews and presentations from experts, you’ll understand more about the importance of company mission, vision and values. You’ll learn how to:

Drive the organisation’s mission, vision and values

Know your values and align them to your business

Use mission, vision and values to support your team and culture

Identify how you measure and build your business beyond the bottom line

Feel confident in your ability to paint the ‘big picture’ for your team

The course will also provide you with invaluable tips for leveraging your clarity on direction and behaviour to further drive your culture. As the Learoy team says, if you feel like your team needs a GPS to get back on track, “make the mission clear by figuring out a direction – then, get everyone on board!”

Online Courses to Increase Your Leadership Skills

You may have also seen our recent article on how to choose the best learning environments for your team?

Both of these eLearning courses are part of the Leadership – Off the Leash journey, developed by the Learoy Tonight team and created specifically for today’s managers and leaders.

With the sheer number of online training courses now available, you might think they all start to look the same.

But the differences can be profound - especially in the case of corporate and academic training.

The clearest way that online training and eLearning platforms differentiate corporate and academic training is in their intentions.

Speaking generally, corporate training is intended to teach students skills that will improve their performance in their work lives. Corporate training is often requested by businesses who are looking to educate their employees on contemporary issues within their industry.

Academic training has different goals. Academic training is usually sought after by individuals who want to gain knowledge, and often qualifications, in a chosen field. It’s all about learning and increasing knowledge. Sometimes a student intends to use their new knowledge in their career, and sometimes they don’t. Education for education’s sake is as much as a reason as any.

So when choosing corporate or academic training, you need to know the differences between the two. Luckily, that’s what we’re about to do!

Corporate training: what can be expected?

The corporate world doesn’t have time to wait around. Business moves incredibly quickly and every competitor in the market needs to keep up or lose out.

It’s for this reason that corporate training tends to hold the quick fix above the life-long learning model; the corporate environment changes so rapidly that processes and ways of working are constantly be revolutionized. This is what molds the corporate training model, and it’s the reason for corporate eLearning courses to be structured in this particular way. Short and sharp, that’s the ticket!

Specialization: Most jobs don’t require workers to take on a wide range of tasks. In fact, with ‘hyper specialization’ of the workforce, jobs are becoming ever more specialized. This is why eLearning platforms offer such specific courses – so that the requirements of specialized labor are met!

You’re unlikely to find much fluff in online corporate courses because it’s a waste of both time and effort. It’s not what they’re for!

The goal behind corporate training can be thought of as teaching the specialized, essential information so that an employee can perform their job well. That’s the reason they’re taking the course, after all.

Rapidly changing and dynamic: Due to the incredible pace of the business world, there is a constant flow of training courses to educate employees on the changes going on around them.

For example, compliance frameworks governing the way an organization stores data changes frequently as potential online threats come and go, or technology evolves. It’s really important, therefore, to make sure that compliance is adhered to. And to do this, employees have to be educated on the changing sands in their industry.

eLearning courses are able to react quickly to changes within an industry, making them the ideal tool for corporate training.

Practical: Perhaps the most important difference between academic and corporate training is the corporate training’s focus on the practical use of skills. For a business, there is little point learning a skill if it isn’t then put to use. What a student learning in a corporate training course is to improve their work performance.

Holistic: Academic training is more concerned with teaching a balanced, developed, and deep understanding of a topic. Unlike corporate training, there is less focus on the speed of communicating an idea, and an increased desire for full understanding.

Slow and steady: Unlike corporate training which is constantly having to keep up-to-date with the breakneck speed of business, academic training tends to focus on traditional theory or thought as the basis of further development; for academic training there is worth and need to understand the evolution of a major thought or theory in a particular subject.

Theory rather than practice: And it’s for this reason that there is a greater focus on theory rather than action in academic training courses.

So there are the key differences between corporate and academic training. They’re important to know so that you can choose a model that is suited to the learning outcomes and intentions that you seek.

Before choosing either model, ask yourself some questions about what you want from the course.

Am I taking this course to learn a specific skill that I will put to use in my work?

Do I want an understanding of a broad and complex issue or a specialized topic?

The nob of the matter is simply this; corporate training focuses on performance while academic training focuses on learning. Neither is better nor worse, but both have different uses.

Understand which model is better suited to your need and then prepare to enjoy your experience!

The difference between corporate and academic training

As a CEO, it’s important to support and champion employee training programs within your organization. Good leaders know that professional development is integral to the success of any company, creating a more positive work culture and better business results overall.

If you’re a HR manager, or have the task of developing training programs for your team, it’s a good idea to think about it from the perspective of your CEO. Taking the time to consider what senior executives look for in training will help you to meet your leadership team’s expectations. It’s also a sure-fire way to make sure your training program is as effective as possible for your employees.

So how do you know what CEOs look for in corporate training programs? What outcomes and results are likely to be expected? Read on to find out.

Improving employee skills and productivity

The first thing your CEO and senior leaders will want to see is an improvement in staff productivity. After all, the main objective of corporate training is to help workers be better placed to achieve organizational goals.

To do this, employees need to acquire the skills they need to perform certain tasks and carry out certain work duties on the job. Training allows them to do this, developing and improving skills that can be applied and used practically – not just in theory.

Your training program should aim to improve staff competencies and increase productivity. Consider how you can measure improvements in staff skill levels. Technical skills can often be measured quite easily, in tangible figures and numbers. Productivity itself is a very good indicator of the success of your company’s training methods, allowing you to see if your training program has been effective.

Your CEO will want to see concrete results when it comes to productivity. For example, are individual employees now able to perform certain tasks more quickly? Do they require less supervision or assistance from management? Is there a decrease in the amount of errors and mistakes made by workers? All these factors show a positive boost in staff productivity, which is good news for your training program.

CEOs will also look to training programs to help bridge any skills gap present in their organization. A skills gap occurs when there’s a mismatch between the skills that employers want and need, and the skills their employees currently have.

HR professional Jessica Miller-Merrell says that skills gaps can be seen as “the point at which the organization can no longer grow or remain competitive, because they don’t have the right skills to help drive business results and support the organization’s strategies and goals.” This is a very unstable situation for any company to be in – ongoing training can help prevent this from occurring. 

It’s important to carry out skills testing to provide your CEO with a benchmark of results across the organization, which can then be used to show changes in employee performance after training.

Last but certainly not least, CEOs want to know that they’re getting a good return on investment for the money they’ve invested in training. You should be able to clearly identify and outline any financial benefits that a training program is bringing to the organization.

As we said above, skills testing allows you to see improvements to staff productivity, performance and skill levels. In this way, the data also reveals whether or not you’re getting a good ROI. We’ve talked before about measuring the impact of employee training: you’ll know whether a training program is a worthwhile investment by measuring the impact it has on your employees and organization.

For example, when staff need less supervision, managers and team leaders have more time to focus on their higher-level duties. And with improved productivity levels, you’ll have less overtime and often increased profits – win, win. When these kinds of changes and improvements can be seen after initiating your training program, your CEO is most likely getting a solid return on their investment.

Thinking about these three things when developing your employee training program will help you keep the end game in mind. You want to show your CEO and senior leaders that the training program you’ve developed has resulted in:

You’ll be showing your strong capabilities as a leader, getting clear results for both your team and organization.

If you’ve found it useful to step into the perspective of your CEO, you may also like to read our previous article on how to think like a CEO. You’ll gain a greater understanding of how things fit together to contribute to the company’s ‘big picture’ – which is an essential part of becoming a more effective leader.

What CEOs look for in an employee training program

When it comes to your career, professional development is an important part of feeling satisfied, rewarded and inspired by your work.

Employees who receive ongoing professional development report being happier at work than those who are not being sufficiently trained or challenged in their roles. In fact, over half of today’s workforce considers professional development to be a contributing factor in their job satisfaction, with 58% of Millennials expecting employers to provide them with relevant learning and development opportunities.

Making sure that you’re continuing to improve your skill set will show employers that you’re committed to both professional and personal growth, which is essential if you want to get ahead in your career. One of the best ways to ensure that you keep learning, developing and growing within your role and industry is to invest some time in professional development courses.

Online courses are one of the easiest and best ways to help you get from where you are right now to where you want to be in the future. There are eLearning courses covering a huge range of professional development topics, from role-specific skills like programming and graphic design, to interpersonal ‘soft’ skills such as improving your communication and dealing with change.

To help get you started, here’s 5 of the best online courses around for professional development.

One of the best professional development steps you can take to boost your career is learning how to properly set and achieve goals. Identifying goals, setting them, and making them stick is easier said than done. But this course can help you do just that.

As the course outline says, “being able to set a path and stick to it, having the perseverance to make it work, and then recognising when you have found success are all the things great leaders are made of.”

This course is about taking responsibility for managing your professional development to achieve your career objectives. At the end of this course, you’ll feel more confident in knowing how to create and achieve your own goals, while using strategies to overcome any obstacles. You’ll understand the importance of networking and career planning – things you may have overlooked or seen as unimportant in the past – to set yourself up for success.

With customer service being central to many job roles, not just the retail and hospitality industries, it's an important part of your professional development. Whether your customers are internal stakeholders or external clients, your attitude towards customer service is likely to have a big impact on the company or organisation you work for.

Improving your understanding of customer service will help you in identifying your customers' needs while building stronger connections and relationships with them. This course will give you the tools you need to understand your modern customer base and how their needs have changed over time. You’ll explore topics such as:

why employee satisfaction is key for customer satisfaction,

the link between decision making and emotions, and

After the course, you’ll be able to review your customer experience strategy and respond more confidently to your customers' needs.

As we said earlier, improving soft skills such as communication can be a great place to start if you want to stand out from the competition and climb the corporate ladder.

No matter what role you’re in, or industry you’re working in, being able to communicate with colleagues, stakeholders, clients and senior leaders is one of the most important skills you can have. And if you want to move into a management or team leader position, you’ll need to know how to communicate effectively with your team.

This online course will help you find the right methods and channels of communication, to help lead you to more engaged and productive working relationships. You’ll leave this course with plenty of tips and tricks to use, and a clearer understanding of the environment you're trying to create within your workplace. Improving your communication skills won’t just benefit your work life – you’re bound to see positive benefits in your personal life also.

Another customer-focused eLearning course, this is interesting material for anyone who is keen to learn more about customer experience and improve their levels of service.

In order to provide extraordinary customer service, you need to understand the journey of your customers. This course teaches you how to map out the customer journey, helping you to understand the critical points in their journey, and how you can make sure their experience at these points is a positive one. You’ll gain important insight into the customer experience, which you can use to improve your customer strategy.

Adding these kinds of skills to your professional development will show your commitment to your customer base and the reputation of your organisation – both very valuable and valued traits in any employee.

This online course is particularly good if you’re looking to increase your leadership skills, as it explores strategic direction and ‘big picture’ thinking.

Leaders not only set the direction of an organisation, but also the company culture. This course will help you build a more collaborative and focused work culture by developing strategies that encourage positivity in the workplace.

identify and drive your organisation’s mission, vision and values

establish your values and align them to the business

use mission, vision and values to support your team and culture

help team members understand how their role fits into the bigger picture.

Even if you’re not currently in a management role it’s worthwhile taking this course. It can help prepare you for a promotion or relief position, giving you a competitive edge over other candidates.

It’s never too late to start, that’s what they always say.

Though most of the time these worn out old sayings tend to be best taken with a hefty handful of salt, in the case of learning a new skill, whether as a hobby, for success in your work, or even to improve the health of your brain, this one hits the nail on the head. Regardless of your age or standing at in your career, learning new skills are incredibly beneficial.

The process of learning new skills gives individuals brand new abilities that can be particularly useful for an employer, as well as new perspectives and insights into the role of skills in any given workplace position. Even new skills that you may not feel relevant to your work can still be used to express the variety of aptitudes you have.

Here’s a look at the process behind learning a new skill and a suggestion of key points that will help you reach your goal.

Pick a New Skill and Make Sure It’s Worthwhile

Like most things in life, making the decision and taking the first step on the road is the hardest part of the whole journey. But once this is achieved, every other stage along that journey diminishes in difficulty.

To get you started with learning a new skill, you’ll first have to pick one. With all the interesting, exciting topics out there this can be tricky. Try first to first focus on a few of your preferences, then you can narrow those choices down.

Learning new skills for work require two main questions. The first is to ask which aspects of your job you enjoy the most. The second is to ask whether what you like doing is valued by your employer.

Deciding on your favorite aspects of your workplace role and basing your new skill on that will make the process of learning easier. Rather than a chore, it’ll be a joy. So for example, if you like watching the way people tick, you could learn a new skill through taking an organizational behavior course. But if you’re a computer programmer, is that going to help your career? That’s why you need to know whether the new skill you want to learn is valued in your corporate environment.

Set a New Skills Target, and Stick to It!

Here’s a fact that won’t surprise anyone: If you don’t put the work in then you’ll never achieve your target. The strange thing is that while everyone is aware of the importance of setting targets and putting in the hours of practice, few people ever do.

Once you’ve picked the new skill target, you set off on your journey. Attend the classes, practice what you’re taught and do not stop trying to learn. The more you practice, the better you get. But make sure your goals are realistic.

If your aim is to be able to hold a conversation in Italian but rarely practice speaking then don’t be shocked when your target deadline passes and you can’t even talk about the weather.

Remember that practice makes perfect and that it’s okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are part of learning and they remind you that you’re not quite there yet. Use them as a means to go on.

The ability to make mistakes dovetails well into the next point in our new skill learning process, which is simply this:  Remember to use your new skill!

Crazy idea, right? But this needs to be repeated. What is the point of learning a new skill if you’re not going to use it? If in the workplace a manager requires some help with HR work and you happen to have recently finished that organizational behavior course put yourself forward. If you’ve successfully completed that Italian conversation class and the boss is having trouble communicating with a client in Rome offer your new skill and dive right in.

A Method to the Madness – Make New Skill Learning Easier

Remember that in the journey of acquiring a new skill there are some factors that will make success more of less likely. One that we’ve already mentioned are picking a skill that will be valuable and that you think you’ll enjoy earning. Another is setting realistic goals.  But one of the most important factors in learning a new skill is the method of learning.  Online courses are a fantastic way to assist learning.

Resources like online learning course, or eLearning, are really helpful for professionals of any age. They’re mobile for learning anywhere, and flexible to suit any lifestyle. Working full time is no problem for online courses because you can go at your own pace. If there are kids to look after, you can log on and study after they’ve gone to bed.

For the most flexible yet effective of learning methods, look no further than an online learning course.

Enrolling on a course that certifies your ability to work in a group or that you are able to motivate others may seem a little silly, but put your biases aside for a moment.

Soft skills – those personal attributes that allow individuals to work harmoniously with others – are very highly considered. In fact, those who do not exhibit social abilities are unlikely to be considered for leadership roles. Soft skills are vitally important at leadership level.

So learning new skills that positively reflect your social abilities is time well spent. Add strings to your bow by certifying your attributes. Soft skills are needed now more than ever.

Have you moved into a role which requires you to be an LMS administrator?

It’s important for organizations to have a dedicated person in charge of managing and monitoring their Learning Management System. Your LMS can be used to improve business operations, workplace processes and company culture – and as an LMS administrator, you hold the keys to the success of your LMS.

Here’s what you need to know about being an LMS administrator, to help you feel more comfortable and confident in your new role. For managers and leaders, this article will also highlight the skills you should look for in an LMS admin, and how their job duties can help improve your business.

Learning management systems can be used successfully for a number of different reasons. They can be used to onboard new hires, enrol learners into eLearning courses, and monitor and track professional development. They can also be used as communication and collaboration platforms, to help improve organizational culture.

For your LMS to work well for your business, an LMS administrator must be able to take care of the everyday operations of the system, for administration, documentation, reporting, and creation of training programs. If you’re an LMS admin, you should also work to establish a positive working relationship between technical support and the program manager.

Kamy Anderson, expert in learning management system and eLearning authoring tools, divides the key responsibilities of an LMS admin into three categories:

Technical duties – defining user roles, creating learning courses, building custom certification, providing feedback for learners.

Collaboration duties – Participate in the process of information exchange, assist in the process of the review creation, consult with other teams to implement the best learning practices.

Staff training duties – create training courses on a regular basis, keep track of freshly uploaded relevant courses, spot and resolve issues in courses, help learners with any issues.

Let’s look closer at the technical duty of creating online learning courses, because it’s one of the most important duties of the LMS admin. Many administrators are given the task to create online courses either within the LMS or through an authoring tool that is then uploaded into the system.

If you’re new to creating eLearning courses this could appear as a pretty daunting challenge. But we’re here to help you out with that too. We recently published a handy eLearning course design checklist, to help you feel confident in designing online courses in the best way possible for your audience. This comprehensive design checklist will ensure you’re covering important aspects of eLearning design throughout the process – such as accessibility, navigation, graphics, multimedia and assessments.

You can also read our article on what makes a good online course design, in terms of the psychology behind the design process. This will give you a more in-depth discussion of online course design, helping you to connect more closely with your learners and their needs.

Taking the time to learn more about creating online courses will help you to provide your organization with user-friendly, successful, effective eLearning courses.

With so many duties and responsibilities, an LMS admin needs to have strong skills in a number of different areas.

First up, you obviously need to have the technical computer skills to manage the Learning Management System, and the ability to learn systems and processes quickly.

You’ll also need to be an effective communicator, with the interpersonal skills to talk to people from business units across the organization – face-to-face, in email and over the phone. Being organized, efficient and able to manage your own workload is essential for LMS admin. And having a strong eye for detail will be an advantage, to both minimize and recognize errors in the LMS.

Anderson adds to this list, believing that a good LMS administrator needs to have “a dedicated approach and perfect understanding of your organization’s policy and goals when it comes to learning” and be 100% “familiar with the compliance requirements in your business sphere.”

As you can see, the role of LMS administrator is very important for an organization's learning processes, and the professional development of its employees. With your role, you have the ability to make a very positive impact on company culture and the people who work within the organization. Good luck in your exciting new role!

What you need to know about being an LMS administrator

As a manager, you have a responsibility to the professional development of your staff, helping members of your team to continually develop and strengthen their knowledge and skills. To do this, it’s important to know how to choose the best learning environments for your team – so each employee has the opportunity to learn in the way that is best for them.

Everyone is different. And we all learn in different ways. Recognising your own learning style and the environment you work best in is a huge factor in your own professional development. In the same way, understanding which type of learning environment suits your employees best will allow you to work with them in the most effective way, while also making the most of your L&D resources.

If you’re in a management or leadership role, you’re in an exciting position to lead the way in improving professional development in your workplace. So why not take the time to gain a better understanding of learning environments, for the benefit of your team and organisation?

Thanks to technology, we’ve moved far beyond the dull days of workplace training. With new learning technologies, there are now plenty of exciting ways to help people learn, including eLearning, mobile, social and blended learning. And learning isn’t just confined to the training room.

There are many environments in which you can gain knowledge, which can be divided into four quadrants:

Effective learners learn in all four quadrants. So it’s wise to adapt to the future of learning and use this information to the advantage of your team.

HR managers, for example, are using a range of tech tools to improve the way they hire, onboard, train and manage employees. By investing in good learning technology, you’ll be far more likely to keep staff engaged, motivated and happy in their jobs – which is a win for both individual and organisation.

Keen to learn more about different learning environments for your staff?

The online course, How to Make the Best Learning Environment Choices, is a great place to start. Through this eLearning course, you’ll learn how to embrace learning environment diversity, which means offering development opportunities in a way that better meets the needs of the individual, not just the business.

Through videos, interviews and presentations from experts, you’ll learn what the future of workplace learning looks like, and discuss trends in leadership development and how workplace learning has changed.

You’ll work through the blended learning model, to understand the benefits of this practice for your employees. The course is specifically created for managers, so you’ll be given plenty of tips and tricks you can use back in the workplace to really understand and support your team.

While discovering how to identify your preferred learning style and environment, you’ll also be encouraged to experiment and try to expand your learning style, so that you can learn in other ways or environments. With the course running for approximately 30 to 45 minutes, you can cover all this in less than an hour!


How to choose the best learning environments for your team

Employees are typically given specific roles and responsibilities within a workplace. When something doesn’t fall within their wheelhouse, it gets shifted to someone else. Over time, the culture of sending something down the chain creates silos which harm productivity and keep knowledge segmented.

What causes these silos? Often, it’s a lack of proper communication and collaboration within the office. And it’s a highly prevalent issue.

In a survey of senior executives, only 25 percent of the participants said their workplace was effective at sharing knowledge across theoretical boundaries. Luckily, there are options for those interested in improving collaboration and focus in their teams. It requires fundamental changes to a company’s culture but, once these are in place, you’ll see productivity rise as workers are able to communicate more effectively, even between departments.

The How to Build Collaborative and Focused Teams course will help you bust through harmful silos to create a more supportive environment that encourages everyone to work as a unit. It provides methods for letting employees play to their strengths by creating thorough plans based on shared goals.

Here's a snapshot of everything covered in the course, so you know exactly what to expect as well as the benefits you’ll receive.

Welcome to the better way of doing business

The course begins with an introduction designed to help you see the various methods for building strong relationships with your team. You’ll learn about motivating your workers to be at their best and how to encourage trust among the group’s members.

This serves as a critical foundation, one upon which you’ll build a collaborative and focused team that can accomplish more in less time or by using fewer resources, all while working together seamlessly.

In the “Building Trust” module, you’ll gain insights into the differences between how a workplace with and without trust operates. Then, you’ll be introduced to methods based on Stephen Covey’s Theory on The Speed of Trust designed to help you cultivate a strong culture and positive relationships, all while fostering good communication.

Techniques for restoring broken trust are also included, allowing you to recover from any damage that may have been done previously. The goal is to improve the level of trust. That way, it will be easier to gain support for any other changes that are required to improve operational efficiency through better collaboration.

If you want to institute real change within your team, you’ll need to create a culture that fosters the new concepts of increased collaboration. In this module, key aspects of the “Circle of Safety,” an approach supported by Simon Sinek, will be covered.

The intention is to help you learn what it takes to build a workplace that functions on mutual trust and respect, ensuring all members of the team feel supported by each other and their manager. By establishing a “Circle of Safety” everyone has one another’s backs, keeping everyone protected and secure as they do their part.

Trust alone isn’t enough to get your team operating at their optimal level. The “Performance Planning” module teaches you how to motivate your employees properly and plan to ensure peak efficiency. You’ll be introduced to the cycle of driving team performance as well as techniques for bringing it into your workplace.

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