Innovation is an essential ingredient of company growth. When business leaders apply innovative solutions to training and development, they can empower their employees with practical knowledge and expertise. Continuously sharpening employees’ skills and enabling them to acquire new ones will give a company a competitive edge in the market and help them reach a broader range of audiences.
A study published by the Journal of the Knowledge Economy notes that increasing the competencies of workers is crucial to solving organizational challenges. Employees’ constant training and skills development should be a core corporate strategy to keep them up to date with the tremendous changes in the global economy. Instilling a growth mindset in employees can improve their morale and loyalty and motivate them to make accelerated progress in their careers.
Recent trends in employee training and development
Technology innovates rapidly, and the ever-changing business environment demands businesses to keep up. Daniel Ling describes the current professional landscape as one that relies on technology. Companies rely on digital tools daily to reach out to their customers, plan their daily targets, and develop their content. A company’s survival depends on learning how to adapt to this fast-evolving area of knowledge. Filling in technology and digital marketing skill gaps ensures a competitive advantage in a highly competitive business environment.
Cloud infrastructure is among the many technological innovations businesses have adopted in the past few years. It provides companies various benefits such as improved flexibility, reduced costs, and increased agility.
With more and more companies migrating their workloads and applications to the cloud, they now face a new hurdle—training their employees to become cloud experts. In fact, this is an obstacle a company has to overcome to allow them to maximize the full potential of a cloud system. A study by ZDNet2 found that 74% of its respondents pinpointed technology complexity as the primary challenge in adopting a cloud solution. Simply hiring cloud practitioners is not the solution because all technical teams should be able to deploy and run any application in a company’s cloud. Further, developing foundational cloud knowledge across the entire organization can prepare teams to advance more rapidly.
Cloud is the next frontier for employee learning and development
Cloud infrastructure is one such frontier for employees’ growth and development. Before cloud computing became the norm, companies would use programs downloaded from a physical computer or server. This required having an on-site data center and a dedicated team of It professionals and resources. This kind of set-up was time-consuming and expensive, stalling employees’ skills due to the mounting costs of keeping up with new technology.
Cloud serves as an alternative solution for enterprises for their business operations. It is now the rising trend in data center management and is slowly inching to become the norm across many companies.
Market insight analyst Sarah Gaffney notes that 95% of companies believe their workforce should be skilled and knowledgeable with cloud capabilities. They know all too well that investing in various skill-building opportunities for employees is the best way to maximize the shift to cloud infrastructure. Programs on cloud skills enablement and cloud training and certification are essential to the success of cloud projects and company-wide goals. These programs can expand employees’ versatility and allow them to take on new roles within the company.
The rapid digital transformation across various industries effectively improves companies’ metrics and performance in multiple areas of their business operations. But implementing this radical transformation should not leave employees hanging. As integral pillars of a company’s advancement, they too should be part of the growth through learning and development.
Exclusively written for westpole.be by Jamie Brauer