Help your team grow with professional development training

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!

How to Make Team Decisions

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.

How to Understand Your Brand

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.

How to Manage Customer Feedback

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.

You’ll cover:

• Handling a Customer Complaint
• Developing a Strategy for Customer Complaints
• The Power of Social Media

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

How to Manage Team Conflict

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.