5 Professional Development Opportunities Businesses Should Offer

Professional Development

Offering useful and meaningful professional development opportunities to your staff members is one of the keys to a more effective company.

Investing in professional development may help your company avoid costly mistakes and keep your best employees motivated and increase their knowledge.

This way, it may be more likely that you’ll retain your best workers and spend less in hiring and training new staff.

5 Professional Development Tools

Here are five ways you can offer professional development choices to your staff members.

1) Collaborative Workshops

One way to help keep your employees’ skills sharp and their engagement level high is with a collaborative workshop approach to professional development. Rather than bringing in an expert to lecture for employee training sessions, try implementing a more interactive approach that allows your staff to build their skills through team sharing activities.

You can utilize your resources by helping your company’s different departments share expertise with topics like computer technology, management strategies, customer service skills, and more. You can also help foster community within the workplace by using this method.

2) Leadership Development

Next, be on the lookout for budding leaders who show promising skills that could benefit your organization’s corporate structure. Spending time on developing leaders within your company is a great way to build up your team’s supervisory skills and their own expertise in the job.

You can also look to your own backyard when recruiting for new managers instead of hiring from outside sources. Many companies find that staff members with credentials from top graduate programs, like the University of Maryland business school, demonstrate many of these leadership qualities.

3) Intern Mentoring

Another way to help get more out of your employees is with an internship program. You can partner with a university in your community, like UAB Online, and help find qualified interns who may be able to be recruited as new hires for the future.

Additionally, you can help your current staff take on new leadership duties by tapping them as intern mentors for the new class of students.

4) Online Coursework

Strong businesses also look to online coursework opportunities for employee professional development. There are many ways to bring online coursework to your staff, or you can simply encourage career growth by sharing graduate and other online classes through email or a staff bulletin board.

Some companies partner with local colleges and create low-cost courses of study that allow employees to develop new skills on the job.

5) Growth Incentives

The last method of offering professional development to your workers is through an incentive program. The most popular incentive you could give your employees for professional development is tuition reimbursement. Some companies allow workers to take a certain number of credits each year or semester and get reimbursed upon successful course completion.

Another great incentive to offer is a pay raise for employees who earn additional degrees while employed with your company.

Developing your current staff members into tomorrow’s company leaders takes some time and investment. Eventually, your time, effort, and investment dollar amount could pay off with new talent and new company ideas to help boost your organization’s profit and productivity.

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3 thoughts on “5 Professional Development Opportunities Businesses Should Offer

  1. Absolutely. Who among US doesn’t want to learn something new or gain a better way of doing something we need to do? Managers are people too, right? (grin) — One missing link in all this seems to be The Supervisor, who has all kinds of real stress from managing and leading the actual people who DO things but who seldom get good access to training and development these days since T&T and HR departments are spread so thin.

    Numerous surveys say that companies are not training them, but that they are also expecting them to take courses on their own time and often at their own cost.

    Nuts.

    We see numbers on engagement and innovation and motivation being low but we do not spend much time, energy or organizational resources leveraging supervisor and worker interactions. We spend tens of thousands on developing senior leadership but not much on the only people directly managing the workers.

    Wheeeee.