Employees have identified learning and development opportunities as key career priorities for years. More than 83% of candidates say that access to learning opportunities determines which roles they’ll apply for and which job offers they’ll accept.
However, upskilling and reskilling shouldn’t just be a focus for employees. Business leaders need to prioritise educating their team members, too. Development opportunities are crucial to attracting and retaining talent in a skills-short market and essential to preserving your competitive edge in a dynamic engineering landscape.
As the world continues to evolve, with new technologies and developments across sectors, training your employees ensures they can continue to flourish and deliver results for your business.
The Learning Edge in the Engineering Landscape
The world as we know it is changing at an incredible rate. In the last few years alone, we’ve seen the rise of new, transformative A.I. algorithms (like generative artificial intelligence), new opportunities for automation, and new virtual landscapes introduced by extended reality.
Innovative technology, new customer preferences, and different working styles, like hybrid and remote work, have led to numerous skills gaps in the engineering industry.
A Gartner study found that 58% of the workforce needs new skills to thrive in the current landscape.
If you don’t give your team members the training they need to excel in their roles, your business will either lose its competitive advantage or lose employees to competing organisations.
Alternatively, investing in employee development unlocks benefits like:
Greater Adaptability and Resilience
Resilience and adaptability are necessary in today’s changing engineering space. When faced with a broad set of new challenges, technologies and working styles, employees with a wider range of skills and a commitment to continuous development are likelier to excel. Resilient and adaptable employees help to preserve and improve business growth.
Improved Employee Retention
Employees want new skills, to excel in their roles, and to see growth opportunities. Seventy percent of high-retention-risk employees say they plan on leaving their employer because they don’t see a future in their current job.
Upskilling and training employees help you retain your best talent for longer. It also lets you identify potential team members who could move into leadership roles, enhancing your succession planning strategy.
Enhanced Business Performance
Employees who are engaged, happy, and satisfied at work are more productive and creative. Skilled team members accomplish more with less. They’re more efficient in their roles, more likely to discover innovative solutions to problems, and more adept at improving your company’s profits.
Better Talent Acquisition
Development and training strategies aren’t just a great way to boost employee retention. They can also help to attract diverse engineering talent to your company. A strong approach to employee development shows potential candidates that they have room to grow within your organisation. It can help you overcome skill shortages and build a diverse team of employees with unique skills.
How to Optimise Employee Development
Investing in employee development pays dividends for engineering business leaders. But how do you make sure you’re implementing the right development strategy?
Here are several strategies that work.
1. Identify Development Needs
The best employee development strategies are tailored to your employee’s needs and your business’s overarching goals. Take a collaborative approach to assessing talent gaps in your organisation. Ask team leaders to identify potential improvement areas based on their employee performance assessments.
Use performance and skill tests to determine where employees might lack certain capabilities in areas that matter most to your company. Remember to look at essential technical and trending hard skills, like digital literacy or proficiency with A.I.
Think about soft skills, such as communication and collaboration skills for employees working in a hybrid setting, emotional intelligence, or time management skills. Ask your team members to share their honest thoughts on their strengths and weaknesses, and work with them to build personalised development plans.
2. Explore Different Employee Development Methods
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to training engineering employees. Some employees benefit most from formal educational programs, such as traditional classes, workshops, or one-on-one tutoring from an industry professional. Others prefer getting hands-on peer support from a mentor or engaging in cross-team learning practices, where they shadow other employees.
Some staff members may want to manage learning and development independently with online courses and digital resources. Offering team members a range of learning options to choose from ensures that you’ll be able to boost engagement from your staff.
It also means that you’ll be able to ensure learning and development are accessible to everyone, regardless of their learning styles or preferences. You might even leverage technology to help you with your training resources.
AI-driven learning platforms can help you build personalised courses for different team members based on their strengths and weaknesses. Extended reality solutions like virtual reality applications can offer access to immersive, hands-on training experiences.
3. Create a Culture of Continuous Learning
For your approach to training and development to have the biggest impact on your organisation, it needs to be ingrained into your company culture. Team members shouldn’t just look forward to workshops or courses once or twice a year.
Everyone should be working together with a focus on continuous improvement. Studies show that companies focused on constant learning and improvement are 92% more likely to innovate. They’re also more profitable, productive, and resilient.
With that in mind, make learning a core part of the workplace experience. Get team leaders to “lead by example” by asking them to participate in courses and learning opportunities.
Encourage cross-functional collaboration to enable peer-to-peer learning. Ask team members to give their colleagues feedback and guidance to help them grow. You could even incentivise learning with an approach to gamification.
For instance, you might give employees points or badges every time they complete a course or demonstrate a commitment to ongoing education. Those points could then be exchanged for extra perks, like vouchers or flexible days off later in the year.
4. Measure the Impact of Learning Initiatives
The only way to ensure you’re constantly improving your engineering employee development initiative’s impact is to measure the results. The trouble is the results of a training strategy aren’t always immediately obvious in financial terms. You need to be able to look for other evidence that your strategies are working.
One way to do this is to measure crucial metrics, like employee engagement levels or productivity. You can do this by surveying your employees to find out how satisfied they are with their roles or asking them for feedback on improving your management style.
You can measure productivity and performance by looking at how frequently employees hit their targets, meet deadlines, and contribute to significant business outcomes. Use the information you gather about the success of your learning initiatives to identify ways to improve your development strategy.
Asking team members for their input is particularly helpful here, as team members who feel they have a hand in shaping learning initiatives are more likely to engage with them.
5. Prepare for Common Challenges
Just because engineering employees overwhelmingly want learning opportunities doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges to overcome when implementing your initiatives. Identifying the hurdles you’re likely to face before rolling out your programs will help you find ways to mitigate them.
For instance, if you’re concerned about a limited budget for training opportunities, looking for low-cost ways to enable learning, such as mentorship programs and online courses, can address this issue. If you struggle to convince employees to invest time into learning initiatives when they’re already tackling a busy schedule, help them allocate sections of their work week to learning or allow them to access learning resources outside of the office.
If your employees resist your learning initiatives for other reasons, ask them why they’re not interested and help them understand the benefits of developing new skills.
Ultimately, investing in developing your team members is crucial. It ensures your company can stay competitive and resilient as the industry continues to evolve and helps you to attract and retain the right talent for your organisation.
While there are often hurdles to overcome when implementing a long-term development initiative, the results can be astronomical, from increased profits to better employee retention.
Invest in the future growth of your company and the satisfaction of your teams by making learning and development a priority this year.
All the best
Steve
At Coalesce we have been partnering with engineering candidates for over 28 years; if you would like our support on mastering employee development to boost business growth, then give us a call on 07512 821708 or email us here.