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The kind of learning the market is demanding has changed. As companies of every size and shape adapt to an increasingly digitized business environment, boards and management teams are realizing that they need new approaches to leadership development, employee learning, and training initiatives.
Nowadays, employers are more driven to hire people because of their passion, social media skills, personal branding and their ability to keep learning, rather than by that piece of paper from an employee’s alma mater.
In addition, established companies are realizing that people with a finger on the pulse of emerging knowledge and innovation are better employees, and can often be of great value to the organization. Learning in the workplace is now perceived as a great company benefit.
The desire to learn
The most flexible and innovative companies should take advantage of that need to learn and put it into action. A company that wants to boost its business should be actively working on a corporate learning strategy as part of their HR strategy and as an employee benefit. A learning culture should be established in the workplace.
To be considered a great place to work, and to get the best employees to boost business, companies need to step up their learning in the workplace policies to train and retain effective leaders.
How? By providing employees with the ability to acquire any skills they want, when they want them, without content limitations. Allowing your workforce to have on-demand, learning possibilities is potentially the most powerful tool a company can have.
A learning platform with digital resources, such as ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, videos, courses and more, offers employees and employers many benefits. It allows you to boost your benefits strategy and reinforce your branding – by offering personalized content, as well as the ability to upload your organization’s own content. It can also create an engaged online community, one where employees will become a part of learning clubs, propose new titles to share with their teams, engage in online conversations to boost their knowledge and share experiences. In addition, it makes sure every kind of employee receives relevant content to acquire the skills they need to better perform professionally.
Learning should never stop
These days the learning curve starts very early in our careers and almost never stops. It doesn’t matter if you currently have a management or leadership position; you know you need to be actively learning to maintain career momentum.
Lifelong learning has stopped being a catchphrase and started being imperative to a successful and continuously growing career.
Implementing a clear learning strategy for your employees, as well as giving them technological solutions that can easily be adapted to their busy lifestyles and are also engaging enough to maintain the excitement to continuously learn, is key to having a modern and strong benefits strategy.
Learners are leaders
Organizations must now rethink how they develop leaders and improve their workforce capabilities.
Academic research into the relationship between learning and leadership has shown that more active and versatile learners subsequently consider themselves more frequently involved and engaged in leadership behaviors.
Leadership competencies may be developed and enhanced by various learning techniques. People usually learn how to lead from three sources: job experiences and assignments, relationships and formal education/training. By implementing a learning solution in the workplace, you ensure all three sources will be present in one place.
Job experiences and assignments
Learning from observation and from trial and error is one of the most effective learning techniques. Sharing job experiences is possible in an online environment where you have chat rooms, forums, and online book club experiences, as well as digital learning rooms; all suitable to share job experiences and professional advice between colleagues, teams and even with other companies from the same sector. Also, learning by doing is very effective: having a learning solution ensures access to content that can be directly applied to work tasks; so employees learn and apply the knowledge almost immediately, ensuring that concepts have been truly understood and deeply learned.
Relationships
Generating relationships between colleagues, teams, and mentors or members of other companies is key to learning. This can be easily done by accessing learning rooms.
Formal education and training
In addition to having personalized recommendations about relevant topics for every employee, companies can introduce formal learning plans. In addition, learning clubs can be used as introductions to an organization’s mission and culture, or be specific for different departments: creating a leadership plan for the sales team, boosting teamwork skills within the developers’ team, or having generalized marketing training for every leadership position in the company. The possibilities are endless.
Originally published by REBA: https://reba.global/content/learning-in-the-workplace-an-effective-way-to-become-a-leader