Personal Development

What is personal development?

Personal development, also known as self development, is the process of analyzing your skills, abilities, and goals both personally and professionally. By becoming more self-aware, you can seek ways to improve and expand your skills, abilities, and mindset and achieve your goals.

Personal development is something employees must do themselves, however, your business can also provide support. To do this you can allocate employees time to learn, incorporating it into reviews and one-to-ones, and providing them with learning materials such as eLearning courses. This is known as a personal development plan (PDP).

What is personal development training?

As an employer, you can help your employees by working with them on a PDP. It’s important that a PDP is personalized toward each individual employee so they can each meet their own goals and objectives.

Personal development training provides employees with the skills and knowledge they need to grow. Training can cover every aspect, from how to create a personal development plan to skills such as time management and working in teams. Training aims to improve the efficiency, productivity, and confidence of your employees which benefits both them and your organization.

A PDP can help employees in the following areas:

• Develop their self-awareness, including identifying their strengths, weaknesses, and goals
• Understand the direction in which they want to go so they have more control
• Increase their motivation and engagement through learning
• Create a sense of balance and belief

Should you offer personal development training to your employees?

Regardless of the size of your organization, a personal development plan and subsequent training should be a priority. After all, if you’re not focused on the development of your employees then it can’t be possible to focus on the growth of your business.

By improving their skills, your employees can strike a better work-life balance. That doesn’t mean working longer or fewer hours - it means finding ways to use their skills and knowledge so they can be more efficient and productive in the workplace. Your employees will be more engaged and motivated, which helps them produce better work on time, and on budget.

In turn, this increases morale, personal growth and leads to a greater sense of job satisfaction. For more information, check out our blog post on why investing in personal development is important for employers.

How does personal development training benefit your business?

It’s true that personal development training will have plenty of benefits to your employees, however, there are just as many benefits to your business, if not more, such as:

• Better communication and collaboration across the business
• Less downtime and improved time management
• Improved results
• Your business can offer a wider range of services
• Stronger relationships with customers, clients, and suppliers
• Establish yourself as an employer that values its employees
• Lower employee turnover, which means you can promote from within and avoid expensive and time-consuming recruitment

Personal development courses can cover a huge variety of topics, meaning your entire workforce can create their own PDP.

What sort of topics does personal development training cover?

Personal development goes beyond learning a new hard or soft skill. It’s a plan for progressing both personally and professionally to help employees achieve their goals.

In order to do this, there are different topics that training courses cover, like getting into the right mindset, developing emotional intelligence, and how employees can prioritize their development. It can also be about improving soft skills like communication and problem-solving, or hard skills like coding and business writing.

There are no expectations when it comes to creating a PDP, other than what is right for your employees and how their ambitions align with the goals of your business.

Can you learn about personal development online?

A convenient, flexible, and cost-effective way to learn about personal development is via eLearning. Online courses can teach employees everything from how to create a PDP to the hard and soft skills they want to improve.

Unfortunately, with persistently tight deadlines, even the most motivated employees can struggle to find the time to work on their PDP. However, an online personal development training course can be accessed anytime, using any device, for any amount of time. That means, eLearning is a great way to utilize microlearning techniques, which helps with engagement and retention. Course materials can be picked up as and when employees have the time, so even with just 15 minutes of development time a week, a one-hour course can be completed in less than a month.

What are some of the best personal development courses?

For businesses that understand the importance of personal development, online training courses are a fantastic tool. Below are just some of the best courses available to access right now:

• How To Create A Personal Development Plan
• Essentials - Personal Development - Plan Your Own Development
• Essentials - Personal Development - Problem Solving
• Essentials - Personal Development - Managing Yourself
• Essentials - Personal Development - Time Management
• Essentials - Personal Development - Working in Teams
• Personal Skill Development Plan
• Essentials - Personal Development - Negotiation Skills
• 8 Ways to Prioritize Your Professional Development
• Emotional intelligence: Self-management

Upskill your employees today

Ready to develop your employees? At Go1, we have a wide range of eLearning courses that can be accessed right now. For more information on how Go1 can support your organization’s learning and development plan, book a demo today.