A common problem all companies face is how to keep employees engaged and invested in company culture. One of the biggest things echoed by job seekers and current employees is the need for professional development. People want to keep growing and learning.
In a 2022 LinkedIn survey, 59% of respondents rated professional development as one of the “top areas to invest in to improve company culture.”
By investing in professional development for your employees, there are so many benefits to reap for both you and them: it reduces burnout, keeps employees engaged and happy, improves collaboration, and so much more.
But, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time and effort on the company’s end to figure out how to deploy professional development programs. Fortunately, bespoke professional development products and even apps that connect to Confluence are readily available, enabling you to offer these opportunities easier.
Here are 5 ways you can deploy professional development tools based on your company’s needs and goals.
1. Start professional development on day one with off-the-shelf courses
If you want to get an employee development program up and running fast, consider a tool that includes content libraries of courses already created. Much of what employees usually need to learn isn’t unique to their organization, so why take the extra time to create a whole new course when you can simply buy it? It’s faster and much less expensive than creating courses yourself.
By buying some or all of your professional development curriculum off the shelf, you’re able to deliver higher-quality training for your employees. Because experts have created these courses, they’re high quality, and they maximize engagement. It’s faster and much less expensive than creating courses yourself.
Absorb LMS has 11 content libraries with thousands of courses integrated right into the tool. They even have libraries for specific industries and concerns, like health care compliance, legal compliance, IT, and DEI.
In Absorb, you can assign courses to departments or sub-departments, a convenient feature for mandatory training needs. The one drawback to this offering is that you can’t assign courses on an individual level.
The tool also includes some AI functionality that suggests courses to users and makes it easier for employees to discover relevant courses to them, which can ultimately lead to them utilizing the tool more often.
2. Create bespoke learning portals for employees
Organizations that have a lot of unique material to teach employees should consider a tool that can build courses and large, searchable custom course catalogs. For instance, with LMS for Confluence, you can create your own learning portal for employees.
If you’re planning to create a lot of the curriculum yourself, look for a tool that makes course creation as simple and low-effort as possible. In LMS for Confluence, existing Confluence pages can be used as training blocks for easier course building. This tool also includes the ability to create tests and certifications, which can help you track participant success with analytics and reporting and improve your curriculum over time.
LMS for Confluence can help spur employee engagement due to the excitement of racking up different certifications.
3. Make onboarding simple with courses that live in Confluence
Using learning tools that integrate into Confluence will not only save your HR or people ops team time, but it can also make the onboarding process less stressful for new employees.
Gilly – LMS app for Confluence is an integration of EduBrite LMS with Confluence that turns your Confluence instance into an LMS with the help of macros.
It allows you to enroll employees in any courses or course combinations you want automatically. When they log in on their first day, they see they’re already enrolled and how to get started from right inside Confluence.
This app is great for training as it allows you the opportunity to build certification programs yourself, or choose from a robust knowledge base. It can also be easier for new employees to navigate through as it lives within Confluence, so it’s one less tool they have to learn. The employees that have past experience with Confluence will find it easier to navigate but those new to Confluence will learn quickly as their knowledge of Confluence grows.
4. Empower employees with open learning
In addition to having more structured courses, consider using a tool that will encourage employees to learn at their own pace and explore courses on their own terms.
This type of open learning empowers employees to think of your organization as more than just a job, providing employees with the option to take whatever courses fit their goals. For example, employees looking to move up to a managerial position might opt to engage with courses on becoming a great leader.
Tools like Smart Courses for Confluence – LMS allow organizations to create open courses that learners can access at any time. Users can also search, filter, and bookmark courses for later. You can even make it possible for employees to access courses anonymously, so if there are courses on sensitive topics, employees don’t have to feel vulnerable in order to get the information they need.
5. Integrate learning data with other tools like Salesforce
Some learning tools incorporate data and analytics into their functionality, which can give you deeper insights. Not only can organizations track how employee development efforts are going but also how these efforts are impacting other areas of the organization. Find out whether your employee development efforts are affecting retention or productivity. Discover whether customer support team training improves customer satisfaction.
By linking your professional development tool with other tools, you can better understand whether or not your employee learning goals are actually being met with your current approach.
Skilljar is a tool that can integrate with Salesforce, among many other tools. This integration allows users to create custom Salesforce reports using Skilljar data. The tool also integrates with HubSpot, Segment, and Zapier. With Zapier, you can create triggers to make certain actions happen – for example, send a congratulations email to students when they get a certification or notify their supervisor when they complete a specific course.
Skilljar also features reporting with custom data visibility, which means administrators can choose what information is viewable and to whom; this way, it’s easy to hide sensitive employee information while still giving necessary teams the ability to access data for reporting purposes.
Something else unique that Skilljar offers is live sessions, so you don’t have to leave the app if you want to host a workshop live. However, the tool doesn’t support recorded video in courses.
Improve employee engagement with professional development tools, like apps
There are numerous ways to incorporate training opportunities into your organization and ensure employees are feeling fulfilled and engaged.
Visit the Marketplace to explore more professional development apps and get up and running quickly with new learning tools for your employees.