How can you become a flexible and competitive company in the face of ongoing changes? Supporting the development of your employees and providing staff augmentation Europe, Asia, the US, Canada, and the rest of the world accumulates a lot of resources for your company, because your experts are the driving force. Let’s look at 8 ways you can support the development of your experts and achieve effective results by having an internal support system in your organization.
What is employee upskilling?
For modern companies, staff augmentation services means including upskilling existing employees and finding point experts with certain narrow skills at the same time. This allows your employees to gradually acquire new skills that expand their knowledge and develop their abilities so that they can independently and effectively fulfill their mission, as well as conserve resources and collaborate with outsourced specialists, such as N-iX experts. Skills development is aimed more specifically at:
- to new entrants, as soon as they take up their post, through an integration process;
- to high potentials (high-potential employees) to promote their development and their progression towards positions of responsibility;
- to any employee when changing positions or when assigning new functions requiring new skills.
Why support your employees in a skills’ development process?
Which employer does not dream of having high-performing employees in their ranks who actively participate in the collective success of the company and contribute to its agility and competitiveness? To achieve this goal, managers are the essential link.
Training and development is a lever for engaging your employees and keeping them motivated in a fast-growing team. By allowing them to develop, you meet their expectations in terms of self-fulfillment and strengthen their skills and capabilities. From a social management perspective, your costs are reduced, and you develop internal mobility.
Discover the main qualities that a good manager must possess that are possible with skills development and team augmentation services.
8 tips for developing your employees’ skills
1. Cultivate confidence, autonomy, and curiosity.
A caring framework based on respect, the right to make mistakes, and support will allow your employees to feel secure and to better value their skills. This facilitates both the development of potential and the learning process. You will thus be able to delegate missions that will gradually become more important and complex.
In addition, by encouraging autonomy and initiative, you empower your employees in their missions and their learning.
Finally, make them want to be interested in new things, to discover new fields. This open-mindedness will encourage their desire to continually learn throughout their professional career.
2. Train your employees as soon as they join them
Good skills management begins as soon as an employee joins the organization and continues throughout their career, supported by various systems and tools that incorporate active learning, such as:
- the integration process,
- the annual performance review,
- the mandatory professional interview,
- the skills assessment,
- the skills development plan.
3. Listen and clarify employees’ skill needs
You need to listen to the expectations and needs of employees in terms of skills development. But how can you do this? You can:
- ask each employee about their desires and needs;
- list the successes and difficulties encountered;
- rely on the last professional interview (discover our professional interview framework);
- identify the main skills needed, based on the company’s objectives.
4. Set clear goals for skill development
To best support your teams, define concrete and achievable SMART objectives, preferably in the short and medium term. Indeed, longer-term objectives seem distant and more difficult to achieve, which often demotivates the employees concerned. Be clear about your expectations in terms of target, expected results, and method to achieve them. Skills development occurs in stages: with each new objective achieved, the employee gains motivation and performance.
5. Monitor progress regularly
In addition, HR software will help you establish regular monitoring of the process using an HR dashboard. In just a few clicks, you can enter the skills to be developed, the training that the employee is following, feedback on the training, as well as the progress and advances noted. Regular personalized feedback allows you to follow your employee’s progress and rectify the trajectory at any time if necessary.
6. Promote the transfer of skills
Encourage the sharing of experiences and circular learning during discussion workshops. Sharing knowledge and information is an effective way to improve the skills of your team. Everyone can pass on the skills they have acquired instead of keeping them to themselves!
7. Collect constructive feedback
You can set up a collective or individual system for mutual feedback. These are privileged moments of exchange that empower your employees in the development of their skills. The principle? Value everyone’s work and establish a dynamic of performance within your team thanks to the feedback culture. How to lead your feedback sessions? Here are some sample questions:
- What experiences and situations encountered at work have allowed a skill to be developed? What problems have employees encountered, and what skills have they used to resolve them?
- Training courses taken and their benefits: Have employees mastered the skills they have acquired? What are their feelings?
- How to optimize internal processes and practices? What skills should teams develop?
8. Capitalize on strengths
Rather than improving an employee’s weaknesses, it is sometimes more appropriate to focus on their strengths. What are the advantages? This allows the employee to be brought into their zone of excellence and thus increase their motivation tenfold. Skills development is done quickly, more smoothly, and efficiently. Success is almost guaranteed! Conversely, by focusing on their weak points, you risk creating a blockage in the employee’s learning process. Alongside these initiatives for skills, the attention paid to QVCT (Quality of Life and Working Conditions) is crucial to ensuring an environment conducive to professional development.
Conclusion
Make learning the focus of your HR strategy, because developing skills should be a pleasure shared by your team members. Each company owner will choose what is closer to him or her: knowledge or soft skills training, but a combination of these two components will be effective.
Training for existing employees and hiring new ones can have many variations: in-person, remote, hybrid training; inter- or intra-corporate; group or individual; short-term or long-term; e-learning modules, quizzes, coaching, serious games, blending… Listening to the needs of your employees, willingness to cooperate with specialized outsourcing specialists, and a desire to innovate will guarantee your development strategy will be successful.
