Companies across all industries are growing. On average, companies achieve between 15 and 45 percent year-over-year growth1, and some organizations grow even more quickly. As companies expand, it can become harder for L&D professionals to manage employee training. By creating a culture of learning and keeping your training team updated about industry trends, you can ensure every employee gets the training they need to be successful in their job role, no matter how quickly your company grows.
When your company is in the midst of a growth spurt, it’s critical that you make employee training a high priority. Employee training can boost productivity, promote engagement, bolster employee retention, and improve the bottom line, according to Entrepreneur.com.2 One way you can make managing corporate learning a little easier is by creating a continuous learning culture.3
The Harvard Business Review said CEB defined “learning culture” as “a culture that supports an open mindset, an independent quest for knowledge, and shared learning directed toward the mission and goals of the organization.” The author also stated that a strong culture of learning is, “the single biggest driver of business impact.”
It’s worthwhile for fast-growing companies to create a culture of ongoing learning because it helps employees stay more involved in their training process and can motivate them to take a more hands-on role in corporate learning. When employees are self-directed, active learners, an L&D team’s training burden is not as heavy, which frees the team up to better manage training across the entire company.
Related Reading: How to Create a Continuous Learning Culture
Another way a rapidly growing organization can manage employee training is by keeping L&D specialists aware of trends that are on the horizon for the industry. With this information, the team can assemble training that not only meets the company’s current needs, but also its future needs. In other words, giving training specialists insights into coming industry trends will help them develop training that will prevent future skills gaps.
The best people to keep your learning and development team up-to-date with industry trends are your industry leaders. Identify the top five industry leaders in your company, then assemble a small team to be responsible for educating the wider L&D team about approaching trends. For example, a tech company’s team of industry leaders might inform learning and development professionals that edge computing will soon become a huge trend.
“Over time, the edge will create an unstructured architecture consisting of a wide range of ‘things’ and services connected in a flexible mesh linked by a set of distributed cloud services,” stated CRN. “Through 2028, Gartner expects a steady increase in the embedding of sensor, storage, compute and advanced AI capabilities in edge devices.”4
Once this information is relayed to the training team, L&D professionals can begin planning training around this impending trend. This process can be used by any company in any industry. Getting the input of industry leaders from an outside company can also be helpful.
Companies that are rapidly expanding must set themselves up for success when it comes to employee training. They can do this by creating a continuous learning culture that encourages workers to take an active role in their training, as well as ensuring that the L&D team has the information they need to anticipate future training needs and plan training accordingly.
Want to learn tips for managing employee training in a fast-growing company? Check out part one of this blog series.