hr insights: 9 pROVEN waYS TO cREATE AN EXCEPTIONAL WORKPLACE THROUGH PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT (pd)
What happens when you go all-in on professional development? We can tell you from firsthand experience. From the beginning of our company, we made career development through training and education not only a priority but a core value. We’ve been methodical ever since about steadily improving our professional development program.
PD is arguably one of the most important pieces of people operations when it comes to giving employees what they really want, beyond the standard paycheck and benefits. Filling your ranks with passionate learners via a strong professional development program not only checks a lot of boxes for employees, it also has become a very real competitive advantage for our consulting firm. In fact, for us it’s been a proven win-win-win for our employees, company, and clients. From employee retention and satisfaction to regularly successful projects and happy clients, the business benefits of professional development are obvious. Educated and specialized staff are more fulfilled in their careers and therefore better equipped to support clients, and deliver consistently positive outcomes.
Components of a great professional development program.
In this article, we share some of the ways we’ve found most effective at implementing training, education, and career development. These actionable tips and techniques have enabled us to create a best-in-class team of happy campers. They can help you build your own worldclass team, too.
- Get buy in from the top and make PD a strategic priority.
Don’t make your professional development program an HR initiative, make it a company initiative. It’s crucial that the program be treated as a strategic priority with the genuine support and commitment of CEO, executive leaders, and GMs. When they present a unified front on PD, employees see, feel, and believe it. This is one of the most important factors to successful training and education in the workplace. Prioritizing it came easy at Pierce Washington because JC, our CEO, has always been a big believer in career development. That authenticity is key, because we’ve all been at companies where there’s more talk of professional development than action or read the recruiting blurbs on company websites we’re interviewing at that didn’t live up to expectation.
- Bake professional development into your culture.
Institutionalize and continually demonstrate it. Hold space for the topic of PD in every monthly all-hands meeting or other regular team conversations. Make it part of your company’s ongoing internal dialogue. People will soon come to expect it, then participate in it. When employees understand the value to themselves professionally and personally, they want more. If you’re doing this well, it begins to generate inertia, momentum, and an environment of continuous learning. Eventually, training and education become embedded into company culture and just part of the job. A sub-note on this subject, give people an opportunity to share work-related things they’ve recently learned, witnessed, or are passionate about. Recognize and celebrate recent wins and reveal how they materialized. Model these winning behaviors and spread institutional knowledge teamwide at every opportunity.
- Dedicate a people-opps person to building your PD program.
Like anything with business value, a successful professional development program needs someone to take ownership of it. Someone needs to be formally tasked with professional development oversight as part of their defined roles and responsibilities. In full transparency, these programs are a bit of work. So, if possible, create or adapt a current HR position to include at least partial dedication to PD administration and promotion. This should be someone with passion for the program that can activate and animate it, promote, nurture and refine it. For our company, we hit a point when our PD effort could no longer be done on an ad hoc basis or be administered as a shared responsibility among team members. Karen, our People Operations Leader, gladly stepped into this role and created a strategic structure around our program to ensure its successful execution.
4. Ask employees what kind of training and education they want.
Don’t assume you know the answers. Ask questions. Learn your team’s knowledge gaps. Find out what certification opportunities they want and need. In our professional services space, employees want to know that their job isn’t stagnant but an evolving experience that moves them steadily upward through their careers. They want to know that we as their employer are empathetic to their desire to grow and increase their skill and value. We know this to be true because we’re always asking for their feedback. We use a variety of methods to assess and track the pulse of every employee’s career development desire, including surveys, regular one-on-ones, and periodic quick check-in calls throughout the year. We ask each employee what’s important to you? What do you need to continually improve yourself professionally? What can we do to make your experience working here better? Our employees have welcomed the opportunity to tell us specifically what they want for training and education.
5. Assign senior staff to every new employee as career managers.
We embraced mentoring within our company long ago. One of the ways we did it is with a career manager program. A career manager (CM) is assigned to every new employee. The CM is a more senior staffer and someone with the most similar skills, goals, and career path as the newer person they guide, coach, and advocate for. CMs help new employees transition into the company and successfully acclimate. Then they share their knowledge and help their mentee develop, grow, and most importantly reach their goals. In fact, goal setting is a key objective—figuring out where employees want to go and how to get them there. Goals and progress are documented along the way. CMs give advice and ideas for unique training and education opportunities and offer opportunities for practice. The senior and junior employees have regular scheduled touch-bases several times a year. CMs are one consistent person employees can go to for questions and individualized support. Over time CMs become trusted confidants. It’s intended to be a long-term relationship throughout every employee’s tenure at PW.
6. Make time for professional development and put it on the calendar.
This one can be easier said than done and it can make or break your PD program. But carving out a little time from busy schedules, project demands, and looming revenue goals is the only way that training and education actually happens. The reality is that there’s never a good time to pause work for career development. But we make time for what we value. It’s a choice. At PW, we found that that there is a strong desire to have more time dedicated to personal and professional development. This is actually a top request we hear from employees. So, despite competing priorities, it’s really up to us as an employer to find a way to solve for that.
7. Create dedicated training events throughout the year, like our PoWerED
At PW, we just completed the first year of our new PoWerED program. (Nothing makes something real like a logo.) The program has two components to facilitate an environment of constant learning and growth. On PoWerED Day all PW employees block out their calendars for uninterrupted professional development. On this day we don’t schedule project calls or internal meetings. We take it seriously. Half of the day is live training sessions hosted by different internal subject matter experts. For our first year, we hosted ten unique training sessions ranging in topics from “Writing Better User Stories” to “Building Your Personal Brand.” Employees register for the sessions they’re interested in as they would anywhere else. The second half of PoWerED Day is unstructured. Employees use this time to pursue certifications, training and education outside of our employee-led sessions. We also have PoWerED Hour every month to keep the spirit of specialized training alive throughout the year. We’re happy to report overwhelmingly positive feedback for this program.
8. Build PD into the budget and fund external training and education.
Professional development isn’t free. If you’re in the services space, it involves some unbillable hours. But put it in next year’s budget—time, training, etc. And don’t see it as an expense, but rather as an investment. When employees bring their own training ideas to you, welcome and reimburse them as we do at PW. Don’t be the company that says, “that’s not part of our budget” or “that’s not something I can approve right now.” Think about the message that sends to the employee. Instead, put your money where your mouth like PW and give financial incentives for career development. Also, welcome PD in all its digital forms today. Embrace the many options that enable people to learn their way. When a PW employee comes to us with a $250 training and education or certificate ask, we say, “Yes, absolutely go for it. You know I support you. Get that expense report in and I’ll approve it right away.” While the ROI may be a little hard to calculate, professional development is a great investment with tremendous long-term payoffs.
9. Don’t set it and forget it. Evolve your professional development
Live and learn. Adopt our career development ideas or learn others and adapt them to your organization. Refine and perfect your PD program over time, right alongside your employees that benefit from it. People and programs evolve, that’s good. From employee’s first month to their fifth, tenth, or fifteenth year, their needs, wants, goals, priorities and interests change. Make sure to support the full employee lifecycle. And keep learning and training yourself on how to craft an ever-better PD program in your company. The goal is to keep all of employees energized and progressing throughout their careers.
Takeaways for job seekers.
- Pierce Washington is a great place to work!
- You can be your best self here.
- You will increase your knowledge, expertise, and value at PW.
- You will be part of a worldclass team.
- You will enjoy coming to work here every day.
Takeaways for companies.
- Client satisfaction is fed by employee satisfaction.
- Happy, fulfilled employees deliver better experiences and outcomes for clients.
- Professional development may be the single best way to achieve that.
- Build your workforce with passionate learners by baking PD into your company culture.
- If done well, PD will transform your company in tangible and profitable ways.
- Your employee retention and client satisfaction will go up, and maybe even soar like ours.
Special thanks to our Boston-based People Operations Leader, Karen Watson, for her insights on professional development.