Teaching Existing Employees New Skills: Practical Tips For Managers

One of the challenges that most managers face in their professional careers is trying to teach long-standing employees new skills. That's because these employees can get quite settled into their roles and can become stubborn to change. Here are some practical tips for managers to try and get the most out of teaching existing employees new skills.

One of the challenges that most managers face in their professional careers is trying to teach long-standing employees new skills. That's because these employees can get quite settled into their roles and can become stubborn to change. Here are some practical tips for managers to try and get the most out of teaching existing employees new skills.

Use Social Media

Whilst social media, at least for a long time, appeared to be a giant waste of everyone's time in the workplace, employers are quickly realising the amount of benefits that this can have. In fact, it may be beneficial for all of your employees to be trained on social media. That's because they could then be in a position to assist in social media requirements for the business, or know how to construct social media posts for job listings, work gatherings and more.

It could also help your employees to learn how they should act outside of work hours. This means how to act online via their professional or personal accounts. With some line of work, you may have industry leaders and customers following workers' social media accounts, and they should know how to use them effectively.

When placed in the right hands, social media can be a powerful and useful tool. The danger is that almost anyone can get their hands onto a social media account, so they should require some basic skills on how to post, integrate potential SEO techniques, and more.

Create A Digital Learning Space

It may benefit you and your organisation to look for more digital means to educate and train your staff. Sometimes, training and education may have different definitions, depending on your industry and how you operate. A digital learning space can mean many different things, but however you do it, you will want to ensure that you will be able to effectively manage it and overlook the process.

The last thing you want is for your workers to take advantage of you providing this training, and them simply skipping through to waste time. This time wasted could be better served improving your overall business and encouraging others to be innovative.

It can be difficult to understand where you get started with digital learning platforms fully. This makes it all the more important that you look to experts such as imc to help build you a learning management system. They can work with you to combine the extensive functionalities and efficiency of an LMS with the user / learner experience of an LXP. LMS of course referring to a learning management system, while LXP refers to your learning experience platform. The best training platforms will incorporate all of these into one system, making it easier for everyone to work with it.

Engage In It Yourself

As a manager or team leader of some sort, you should try to engage in learning new skills yourself. This will allow you to lead by example, show them how it's done, and help get them started on the journey. If your employees notice you've asked them to do something ant it's not something you're doing yourself, they may take it the wrong way and be insulted by it.

That's why you should take It on the chin and get stuck in. It's very possible that you might learn something yourself in this scenario. Try to communicate with them about how you've found it, and be honest and transparent.

Have Fun With It Where Possible

At the end of the day, if you're asking your employees to learn new skills who have been with your business a long time, they may be unhappy about the changes. That's why you should, where possible, try to make it a more enjoyable experience. You could do this by making it more interactive and engaging. You could also look to make it more relevant to either your business or their personality instead.

For example, if you know they are a massive football fan, then you could try to involve that into the new skills somehow. Even if it's just using football terminology and pictures on a slideshow, it's sure to at least gauge a bit of their interest.

Try to involve more than one person in the new skill. You could create an incentive or a prize for learning the skill, or even make it into a competition for everyone to have fun with. However you do it, ensure you are speaking to your whole team to find the best solution for everyone, so that they are not blind sighted by the changes.

Reskill Where Possible

Whilst learning new skills completely fresh can be beneficial, it is worth thinking about how you could reskill workers. This refers to using the skills that they've got, and either developing them into something similar, or solidifying their skills to make them stronger. Reskilling comes with many advantages, but it is arguably not as useful as new skills. Of course, this will all depend on your actual line of work, and the situation will differ for everyone.