03/26/2018

Sell Employees on Professional Development

To grow your internal knowledge, some pitching may be necessary

It’s not picking much of a fight to say that employees should have opportunities to grow in their organizations. What’s to debate? For staffers, such opportunities seem like a no-brainer: Everybody wants the authority, autonomy, and better compensation that’s comes with being higher up the org chart. The job sells itself.

Or does it? After all, potential members need to be pitched on the value of engaging with your organization in ways that go beyond the tried-and-true methods of generations past. (Meetings! A magazine! Discounts!) In the same way, employees may need to be sold on the virtues of professional development, and in some cases immersed in it.

This point is a running theme in a recent Forbes article in which a host of nonprofit leaders share their advice on the subject. Many of the suggestions are of the vague “create a supportive work environment” type, but many are impressively concrete. One nonprofit gives each employee a dozen free sessions of leadership coaching; another holds “enterprise-wide, resume-enhancing training on new platforms”; another actively solicits employee interests and hosts a pair of employee development days; yet another curates lists of relevant classes and podcasts that it invites workers to engage with and report back on.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.