How to Improve Employee Training Courses and Career Development

by Mike Tannian on August 01, 2022

Professional development is fundamental to your organization’s success. Find out how to improve public sector training opportunities with employee development software.

Article Highlights

  • Problem: Cultivating a career development program that serves the needs of both employees and the organization. 
  • Solution: NEOGOV’s Learn, an employee development software that promotes continuous learning and provides the training employees need.
  • Benefits: Thoughtful employee training courses boost retention, improve productivity, and save money and time.

Professional development enables your employees to provide the highest levels of service to citizens. A comprehensive employee training program also empowers individuals in your organization to enhance their skills reach their career development goals, leading to career satisfaction and high retention rates. 

That is… if you’re providing the right employee training courses. 

As an HR professional, you must carefully balance the learning and training needs of the organization as a whole with each employee’s unique career path. If you don’t accomplish this thoughtfully, you can end up with disengaged employees and large skill gaps in your workforce. 

In this post, we’ll discuss the challenges your organization may face if it lacks a robust employee career development program. Then, we’ll discuss how NEOGOV’s employee development software, Learn, provides tools to build the best training courses possible to improve career development.

Problem: Lack of Employee Career Development Program

Inadequate employee development training courses have numerous ramifications for your organization, from unskilled employees to high turnover. Let’s look at a couple challenges associated with cultivating public sector training programs, as well as how this impacts your agency and employees.

Insufficient Training Resources and Difficulties Measuring Impact

One of the biggest challenges is finding training resources that meet your agency’s unique needs. As a public organization, you have to carefully consider whether your training material: 

  • Is government-specific 
  • Targets employees at different levels 
  • Adheres to compliance requirements

For example, you may have no trouble finding basic training for new hires. When it comes to employee training resources that teach advanced skills or leadership skills, however, you’re struggling. Everything is private-sector focused and you can’t find leadership training that speaks to the ethos of public administration. 

You may also be wondering how to track training and attribute it back to organizational goals. You need to be transparent about the impact of training initiatives on the organization, but it’s difficult to accomplish this without employee development software. Without the ability to track training progress, there’s the added challenge of maintaining compliance with mandatory training requirements set by other agencies, like the federal government.

Effect on Employees and Organization

Limited development opportunities create a lack of engagement, career stagnation, and poor job satisfaction for your employees. Individuals without adequate employee learning opportunities are 15% less engaged than employees who receive targeted training to grow their professional skills. 

Additionally, organizations that don’t have an adequate employee training program experience 34% lower levels of retention than organizations that do. This means Human Resources professionals must spend more time recruiting, hiring, and training new employees, rather than undertaking actions that will solve the underlying problem, like finding better employee training courses. 

All of this means time and money wasted on inadequate training opportunities and never-ending recruitment cycles. In short, a bad career development program hurts employees and prevents your government agency from providing the best levels of service to residents. 

Solution: Employee Development Software

Fortunately, overcoming the challenges above may be as straightforward as using NEOGOV’s employee development software, Learn. This learning management system is built with your organization in mind, as NEOGOV specifically serves public sector organizations.

Employee Development Courses and Learning Plans

Learn comes with a growing library of 1400+ pre-built online employee training courses. If you can’t find the training course you’re looking for in this library, you can also upload or build custom courses and quizzes to meet the productivity, safety, and career development needs of your organization. 

You can also use Learn to group both in-person and online employee training courses into different Learning Plans. Within each Learning Plan, build a customized curriculum to meet the needs of employees at all different levels of your organization, including: 

  • New hires 
  • New supervisors 
  • Hiring managers 

For example, your organization may request that hiring managers complete employee training courses that cover topics on lawful hiring, interviewing, diversity in the workplace, and implicit bias. Each of these courses could be included in part of a Learning Plan for hiring managers. 

HR Professionals can use course grouping to create learning paths for a specific career path or career goal. This allows new supervisors to complete training courses for managerial training, such as an employee motivation training course. Your new managers will even receive a certificate of completion as they finish their training courses.

Learn supports blended learning models, so organizations can include both online and classroom courses in Learning Plans, and bite-sized training courses so employees don't get overwhelmed. You can also add third-party training to an employee’s transcript, so every training an employee participates in is tracked and included in their Learner Profile.

Course Tracking and Integration with Talent Management Systems

HR professionals and managers also use Learn to track course completion. Managers can easily see whether training is overdue to ensure that all employees are maintaining compliance with required trainings and keeping up-to-date with certifications, thus reducing risk and liability claims. 

Learn seamlessly integrates with other products in NEOGOV’s talent management system (TMS), including Onboard and Perform.

This integration enables managers to help employees achieve their professional development goals. During a performance evaluation, managers and employees can discuss an employee’s career goals or learning opportunities. Then, managers can assign training for employees within NEOGOV’s performance management system, Perform

In other words, if any employee has expressed interest in career progression to a managerial role, her supervisor can enroll her in a relevant training course. In the next performance evaluation, managers can see whether or not this training was completed and keep the conversation going. 

Benefits of Employee Development Software

Learn empowers employees to take control of their professional development with engaging training courses and user-friendly functionalities. Individuals can search for different types of training by keywords, categories, and competency tags and even access online courses on the go through mobile learning. This boosts retention and productivity, as each individual in your organization can access an employee training and development course that meets their unique needs and career goals.  

These government-specific employee development courses are targeted to individuals at all career levels, so your organization experiences improved employee productivity across the board. Whether a manager completes an employee motivation training course or a new employee finishes their basic safety training, each employee receives exactly the training they need. 

Learn’s online employee training software also allows individuals to track training, certification, and licensure needs. This means that both HR professionals and managers alike can spend more time on the important stuff, like sharing conversations about career growth during performance evaluations, rather than manually checking for course completion. 

Not only does this save time, but it means that your employees receive exactly the career guidance they need with career development plans that improve productivity and boost ROI. Plus, this helps your agency save money on those endless recruitment cycles you’ve gotten used to. 

To sum it up, Learn helps your organization:  

  • Increase employee productivity 
  • Improve employee retention 
  • Save money and time

Final Thoughts

Comprehensive employee training courses are fundamental to the success of your organization. Using Learn, your organization can cultivate the employee training and development course catalog that staff need. To find out how NEOGOV can take your organization’s professional development to the next level, book a free demo today.

Mike Tannian

Mike Tannian is the Director of Content Marketing at NEOGOV. With a talented team of writers by his side, he aims to produce content that delivers real value to public sector HR professionals at every stage in the buying journey.

Related Articles