When we are children, our brains are like sponges ready to absorb every detail around us. As we grow older, while our capacity to remember things decreases, our love for learning things doesn’t. This tendency is a boon for us all but especially for technology professionals! We say this because technology-related fields are constantly evolving and require a dedication to life-long learning practices to truly excel. By learning new things and picking up fresh skills, you’re more likely to come up with ground-breaking ideas and solutions. These are important as they help you adapt to changes and seize new opportunities. They also make you more flexible as a worker and that’s essential in today’s agile workplace.
Let’s take a deeper look at more reasons techies must develop their love for learning.
Benefits of Continuous Learning for Technologists
Constant learning helps professionals do their jobs better, experiencing healthy career growth and enhancement, improving their confidence and morale, and more. It also helps them become increasingly adaptable in an ever-changing environment with a highly competitive workforce.
Upskilling and reskilling have become essential. This study by PwC revealed that 77% of the workers interviewed want to upskill. Participating in training programs that teach you newer skills to do the same job, it’s called upskilling. Reskilling is the process of learning brand new skills to do a different job. Both are important in the tech world. Technological advancements mean that new languages are coming out every day, as well as new technologies and more. That implies you will need to learn these new methods to do the same work in a better way. It could also mean you would have to learn new skills to do a different job that’s related to your overall project.
These two processes focus on improving your skill sets through training sessions, workshops, online courses, webinars, etc. That helps people advance in their jobs and find different opportunities and roles within their company. It’s also important to stay updated on relevant and specialized skillsets that would help close the talent gap in different wings. Since most companies want to maintain their current workforce and create opportunities to strengthen and teach their existing employees, it’s in every company’s best interest to invest in the right upskilling and reskilling workshops.
Benefits of Continuous Learning for Employers
For employers, there are many benefits as well. Encouraging learning in the workplace leads to an increase in employee retention and engagement. It means a better-equipped workforce and a deep culture of learning. It also implies cost-saving in the long run as you’ll be investing in your current workforce and avoiding the expense of knowledge/skill gaps.
Learning boosts employee satisfaction. There are many instances when employees feel like they’re stagnating. Constant learning boosts their motivation, performance, and morale. According to this survey, the number one reason employees leave their roles is due to a perceived lack of growth opportunities. Providing a path to new skills and career growth boosts engagement and employee retention. That makes sense, since learning new skills would keep away cognitive stagnation and other forms of boredom.
That’s why it’s essential to have interesting and challenging workshops and training sessions that you or your employees want to invest in. Choose the topics and skills that are the most pertinent and interesting. That would engage your employees and challenge them intellectually. It would also help them feel like they’re preparing for the future. They can also practice those skills on real-life projects and hone what they already know in the process.
What Can you Do to Encourage Lifelong Learning in The Workspace?
Here are a few strategies you can employ to encourage learning in your workplace:
Identify the areas that need work
Identify priority areas and skills based on the company vision and goals. For instance, your organization may want to ensure its logistics team is updated on the latest industry 4.0 solution and that its sales and marketing teams are using social to their fullest potential. Company and team leaders should prioritize the skills most likely to move the focus on upskilling employees who can fulfill important roles in the future.
Build upskilling into employee development plans
Company leaders should recognize and prioritize the time that it takes to upskill and adjust their employees’ workloads to give them the proper bandwidth needed to focus on learning new skills. Companies can look into enrolling their employees in courses or training programs. Those would be time-bound as well as created by professionals. You can also use internal and external experts to evaluate the efficacy of these programs. That would encourage even the more skilled employees to participate in these learning opportunities.
Provide stretch assignments for upskilling employees
Find the right opportunities or assignments outside your employee’s existing experiences, scope, and job description. That will give employees a chance to learn while taking on new challenges at work simultaneously. For that, you’d have to give your employees the support and resources that they’d need to acquire these new skills and meet challenges. Measuring outcomes is also essential as you’ll get a clear idea of how to improve your training modules for employees to gain the maximum benefits.
This is why it’s important for tech employees to pursue learning throughout their careers and how companies can take the initiative to do so. Take the right steps and you’ll be able to help your employees ascend great heights!