Improvement is necessary for every business.

Whether you are an employer or an employee, if you are not evolving, you might fail soon. Reason? Competition.

Honing your skills is one way of standing steps ahead of your competition. And when you have an entire team, you need to make sure that all of them are sharp and have an adequate skill-set suited for the job.

That’s where employee training comes into play. The aim is to upskill your employees.

But how to actually do that? What are the extremes? Where to start? Where to stop? What to do an what not to?

In this article we talk about the do’s and don’ts of upskilling your employees. Read carefully to find out.

The do’s of Upskilling your employees

Starting with what you should do, here is a list of the do’s.

1. Invest in personalized development plans

Every employee is a different human being and deserves distinct attention. Understand this thing and move ahead with the same mindset.

The key to working this out is getting personal while you design the course.

Try to know the skills that your employees need to hone. What new they need to learn.

Understand the set of your employees you are designing the course for and try to go down on a personal level to let as many employees as possible, connect with the course. If yours is a small business, and you need something that must not blow out your budget, you can choose an LMS for small business, alongwith the scalability that have got your present and future needs covered.

This way your course will make much more sense to your employees.

2. Include real life case studies

The best way of teaching someone something is by giving real life examples.

If your course tells your audience about somebody as normal as them, making it big in the long run, your audience (employees here) will be really motivated.

This is one way of sounding logical and real.

3. Offer stage to the mentors

Another great way of making a skill honing session successful is by inviting/offering the mentors to take the stage.

What you can do is talk the highly designated employees in your organization into delivering a mentoring session for upskilling the other employees on junior levels.

Learning from another employee not only makes use of the desire for social learning but also helps learners develop their skills on the way.

The don’ts of Upskilling your employees

Here is a list of things that you should refrain from while you work on upskilling your employees.

1. Offering training only once

If you are planning to hold a very good training session once, expecting your employees to keep in practice with that, I’d tell you what’s better. NO TRAINING AT ALL!

How?

Stay with me here. The average shelf life of any skill is five years. This means that if your employees lack in practice, chances are they’ll forget the skill very quickly.

Result? Wastage of the resources that you invested in the first and only training session.

2. Not updating the techniques

While traditional learning methods have always been valued, eLearning is taking over too.

With the huge number of learning management systems available, moving ahead with board and sketch marker won’t take you far.

So, for betterment, move onto modern training techniques. Make use of eLearning and enjoy better results as it saves money and is way more efficient than traditional learning methods.

And if you are wondering about learning management systems, just go through this proven process for LMS software selection. You’ll find all the answers.

Final words

When you work towards upskilling your employees, you would want to ensure efficiency.

Spending on unnecessary things will anyway cost you both money and time. To help you there, we wrote this post talking about the do’s and don’ts of upskilling your employees.

We hope this was useful to you.