How to Promote Professional Development to Skeptical Employees

Illustration of a person studying atop a stack of books

Providing professional development opportunities to your workforce seems like the ultimate win-win. Your employees get the chance to make progress toward their career goals on-the-job, and your organization gets to benefit from the skills they learn in the process.

Often, however, getting your workforce to take advantage of the professional development opportunities you offer is harder in practice than in theory.

It’s not necessarily that even your employees don’t want to learn, of course; it’s just that, when they’re juggling so many other high priorities, it’s easy to put professional development on the backburner.

If you want to avoid this scenario, you’ll have to promote professional development as a true and urgent strategic priority - and you’ll have to do it on your employee’s terms.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to do this: by designing your professional development program around the aspirations of your team, you’ll secure their enthusiastic engagement and ensure you’re building the skills your organization needs at the same time.

We want to help. Follow these five steps, to transform your professional development program into the kind of exciting opportunity even your most skeptical employees will make time for.

Relate it to career goals | Connect it to internal mobility | Make it skills-based | Make it social | Involve management

According to the 2023 Workplace Learning Report, the number one reason employees say they get motivated to make use of their organization’s professional development opportunities is if those opportunities “help them make progress toward their own career goals.” (source)

Even more specifically, 78% of employees expressed a need for professional development course recommendations based on their specific learning gaps. (source)

The single best way to motivate skeptical employees to utilize your professional development opportunities is to demonstrate how doing so will help them learn the specific skills they need in order to achieve their own career goals.

First, help determine what your employees’ career goals are. Then, work together to create personalized learning paths designed to help them get what they need to achieve those goals. By showing employees what’s “in it for them,” you can show how on-the-job professional development is in their best interest.

One of the clearest ways to tie professional development to a concrete career goal that will motivate employees is to link it explicitly to internal promotion. As the Workplace Learning Report proves, driven employees are highly motivated by the prospect of promotion. Employees who make internal moves within their company are also much more likely to stay with that company longer. (source)

This is an opportunity most organizations aren’t capitalizing on. Despite the fact that the c-suite’s second-highest priority is “giving employees opportunities to move into different roles within the business,” only 15% of employees say their organization encouraged them to move to a new role. (source)

By creating a detailed and transparent system for promoting your workforce as they develop the skills they need for new positions, you’ll provide even the most skeptical employees with a straight-forward reason to take your professional development program seriously.

According to the Workplace Learning Report, skill sets for the average job have changed by around 25% since 2015, and by 2027, that number is expected to double. But only 26% of surveyed workers say their organization has challenged them to learn a new skill. (source)

Even if your employees are skeptical about internal professional development opportunities, they’re almost certainly not skeptical that their jobs are changing. In fact, 78% of employees surveyed in the 2023 Workplace Learning Report said they wanted course recommendations based on their particular skill gaps. (source)

Work with your employees to better understand what skills they feel they’ll need for their current and future roles. Then, design your professional development opportunities around providing them these skills. Pay special attention to skill gaps - on individual, team, and organization-wide levels.

Almost nine out of ten learning & development professionals agree that proactively building employee skills will help organizations navigate the future of work. (source) By tying skill development to this “future-proofing,” you can show skeptical employees how investing in professional development will help secure their own careers, as well.

Over nine out of ten (91%) employees surveyed for the 2022 Skills Advantage Report said it was important for managers to inspire their direct reports to learn and experiment with professional development. (source) But only 35% of learners were encouraged to learn by their manager in the past six months. (source)

Getting managers involved with the professional development process is another effective way to convince skeptical employees to take part because it allows you to more effectively customize your offerings to their needs.

Have your L&D team work closely with team managers to determine which skills those managers’ direct reports need to develop. Then make guiding and checking in on the learning process a regular part of each manager’s interactions with employees.. Your management team can help prove just how applicable professional development is to their specific direct reports and help make learning a regular part of your organization’s day-to-day.

How to Promote Professional Development to Skeptical Employees

Five steps to make your professional development program irresistible

1. Relate it to career goals

2. Connect It to Internal Mobility

3. Make it skills-based

4. Make it social

5. Involve management

Show skeptical employees what they’re missing with professional development from LinkedIn Learning