Cultivating Brilliance:
6 Unique Employee Growth and Development Ideas
Cultivate true employee brilliance with help from these inspired growth and development ideas.
According to LinkedIn’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report, skill sets for the average job have changed by 25% since 2015. By 2027, this number is expected to double. (source) Today, 89% of L&D pros agree that proactively building employee skills will help organizations and employees alike navigate the evolving future of work (source).
Despite the acknowledged necessity of employee growth and development, however, upskilling and reskilling efforts are falling behind. Between 2022 and 2023, organizations reported only a slight uptick in progress through the early and mid stages of reskilling efforts. Meanwhile, Only 15% of employees say their organization encouraged them to build a new career development plan in 2023. (source)
It seems that employees aren’t connecting with the growth and development ideas their companies offer them. Let’s fix that. These six unique growth and development ideas are specially designed to advance your organization's upskilling and reskilling goals while at the same time providing exciting opportunities for your employees.
It all starts with getting to know what your employees really want:
"More than ever, learning and development professionals have to be change agents."
Rachel Richal
Vice President, Training, Buffalo Wild Wings
President, Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers
6 Unique Employee Growth and Development Ideas
Get strategic, get personal
According to surveys conducted for the 2023 Workplace Learning Report, employee’s top motivation to learn is to “make progress toward their career goals.” (source)
One of the best ways to motivate learners to use the learning opportunities you offer is to show them how these resources will help them advance in their own careers. The first step to making this happen is helping your employees understand, define, and set their own career goals.
Have your employees take courses designed to help them define their own concrete advancement goals, such as the courses included below. When your employees have decided on their goals, you can design customized career development plans to achieve them.
"Career development is simply a strategic set of actions you take to grow in your career by building your knowledge, skills, and experience. And your career development plan is a written account of those actions. A strong career development plan will position you to move further and faster, expanding your definition of success, and empowering you to achieve it on your terms."
LinkedIn Learning Courses:
Think beyond their current roles
The most effective way to keep an employee engaged is to help them gain the skills they need to achieve long-term career goals - not just to learn the skills most relevant to them right now.
Fortunately, helping your employees gain these kinds of skills will also make them more valuable in their current roles. In fact, the most sorely-needed skill sets across all professional organizations today are role-agnostic. They are, in order (source):
Management
Communication
Customer Service
No matter who your employee is or where they want to go, these skills can help them get there. Pick the one your employee wants to learn the most and incorporate it into their personalized plan.
"Forward-thinking organizations need to create environments that embrace and unlock the potential of the whole employee."
Linda Jingfang Cai
Global Head of Learning and Talent Development
LinkedIn
Empower your employees with strategic insight
Business strategy is a unique skill set, in that every member of any organization - whether they’re a leader, manager, or an individual contributor - can benefit from it.
Fostering a strong sense of the strategy behind your overall business plan will help your employees set and achieve more strategic goals within their own departments. Even more importantly, it will help them understand how these strategic goals make progress toward achieving the organization’s overall business objectives.
"Business analysis is a set of competencies, more so than a profession. Competencies such as facilitation, problem-solving, business and industry knowledge are skills we will see needed by a variety of roles outside of just the business analysis profession."
Build the skill of proactive collaboration
According to the 2023 Workplace Learning Report, 83% of organizations want to build a more people-centric culture (source). Obviously, this is a goal everyone in the organization needs to work toward together.
By helping teach your employees the skills they need to collaborate and work together more effectively, you can encourage cross-functional collaboration and facilitate the kind of group discussions that will build trust across the organization.
"When teams work together to produce something amazing, it's a bonding experience that builds strong connections within the team and improves morale overall."
LinkedIn Learning Courses:
Prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion
The 2022 Workplace Learning Report notes that 41% of organizations use DE&I programs to improve employee retention, and it isn’t difficult to see why.
Prioritizing DE&I in your workplace helps everyone feel heard and appreciated, and ensures that the best ideas in your organization always come to light. Equip your individual employees with DE&I skill sets in order to take an organic, holistic approach to cultivating a more accepting and equitable work culture.
"When teams work together to produce something amazing, it's a bonding experience that builds strong connections within the team and improves morale overall."
Deputize your management
According to the 2022 Skills Advantage Report, 91% of employees say it’s important for managers to inspire learning and experimentation. (source)
To foster these skills, train your management team in how they can help support their direct report’s career development. Having them learn each of the top three skills in-demand for managers will help your managers understand how they can do this:
Top three training topics for managers in 2023:
Leadership and management skills
Role-specific digital upskilling and digital transformation
Supporting employee career development
"Be curious, let your people lead, and coach the whole person. With just a little more patience, your employees will do the talking. And the solutions they find on their own will often be way more effective and more durable."
More employee growth and development ideas, along with all the resources you need to make them a reality
The LinkedIn courses and Learning Paths featured here are just a small sample of the expert-led resources at your disposal when you subscribe your team to LinkedIn Learning.
Whatever skills you want to impart to your team, LinkedIn Learning has the best resources available to help you teach them. You can even use the platform to create individualized career development plans for each employee based on their unique needs and goals.