Learning and development can be associated with educational institutions, however, L&D is essential for the growth of an organization. Fostering a continuous learning environment in an organization is essential for an organization to stay competitive in the market. An organization that invests in a flexible learning and development strategy can improve employee, even as the need for continuous development grows.
What is Learning and Development? What is Employee Training and Development?
Learning and development is a tool that organizations use for building hard and soft skills in employees. Employee training and employee development are two factors corporate learning and development.
- Employee training educates employees on the required skills to improve job performance
- Employee development involves continuous learning to expands an employee’s skill set enabling them to grow within their field over time
Understanding the difference between these processes and how to use learning management tools to maximize them is crucial for organizations that want to train and develop employees.
Examples of Employee Training and Development
Employee training and development are both significant processes in businesses of any size. They can be broadly separated by how and when an employee’s learning occurs.
Since training focuses on a job’s required skills, it can include technical and compliance training. Both involve time-specific education on certain parts of an employee’s job. For example:
- Technical training can involve the operation of a piece of technology, a company product, or a service
- Compliance training generally focuses on policies, regulations, and legalities
Both require specific guidelines to make sure employees learn everything they need to meet baseline performance and be compliant within their positions.
Development involves expanding an employee’s pre-existing skills to make them better at their work. Examples include management or executive development, which teach employees new competencies, managerial skills, and leadership strategies.
The important distinction between training and development is that while training readies an employee to perform their required job functions, development helps an employee thrive in their career over the long-term.
Methods of Employee Training and Development
The methods used in employee training and development impact the effectiveness of the training. Various strategies exist for companies of any size to find the learning and development tools they need to properly educate their employees. They can be used alone or in combination to suit a business’s needs. They include:
- Instructor-led training, which utilizes an instructor’s expertise to guide employees through the tasks, duties, and responsibilities of their job
- eLearning, which can be used to control learning materials so that every employee goes through the same program using an electronic course
- Social learning, which involves employees collaborating and learning in a social setting rather than a conventional training setting
- Microlearning, which can supplement any of the above strategies with smaller, more digestible lessons delivered through interactive media or memos
Why Learning Management Systems Have Become Popular for Employee Development and Training
Organizations that recognize how employee learning and development impacts their long-term success, understand that these concepts represent an ongoing process rather than a single checkbox at an employee’s initial evaluation. A corporate LMS (or learning management system) enables employers to providers to invest in employee learning in a cost-effective manner.
A corporate LMS can present learning materials to employees in a way that they can control, accessing them on their mobile devices and collaborating with other employees directly on the company’s program. The analytics derived from these courses help HR departments create better training initiatives while employers save money on in-person instructors.
The goal of learning and development is to support a continuous learning culture within a company. A robust LMS like Qbic offers employees a place to interact, encouraging social learning and growing their job skills incrementally, which makes the learning more relevant to them on a daily basis. Since any number of employees can use the training modules of an LMS at the same time, businesses can use them to save time, money, and labor on their learning and development procedures while setting up a system that can continue the process of employee development, long after the initial training has ended.
