As a professional, it is essential to acquire future-ready skills to stay in the job for a longer time and level up your career to next rung on the career ladder. Acquiring professional credentials play a key role to get promoted or switch over to a better job as it helps you to validate your skills and learnings. Also, it helps to stay in pace with the trending technologies and skills that employers demand.
Likewise, while wearing the learning and development professional caps on, it is essential to promote the employees and trainees within the organization to obtain vendor-neutral certifications and prepare them to be fit with the changing demand of the organization. A career in learning and development directly influences the company’s growth trajectory. Encouraging the employees for learning and development programs to close the skills gap forms the daily routine apart from other priorities.
Learning and development programs could add USD 11.5 trillion to the world’s GDP, World Economic Forum reports. It is essential for learning professionals to support large-scale employee development by encouraging them for professional credentials through a credentialing organization.
To become a successful learning and development expert, it is essential to possess technical understanding, know the basics of human psychology, familiar with the latest technologies and tools, and change management. Let us explore the essential skills for learning and development leaders that will enable them to promote organization-wide learning and development programs and future proof the career as well.
Important skills for learning and development professionals
The skills mentioned here will help learning and development professionals to create an ecosystem and experience within the organization.
Empathy
It is crucial to be human by leveraging emotional intelligence and soft skills. Generally, learning and development (L&D) experts are tasked with extracting the exact needs of the clients. They may be from a department or individual employees carrying various positions. As an L&D professional, one must empathize with them and discover their learning needs.
Though generic training may help the candidates with knowledge, empathy-led conversations help to identify the actual barriers in the candidate. Posing a range of open-ended questions helps to understand the current challenges. Accordingly, you can modify or customize the training strategies and create a specific program. Likewise, it helps to identify the weaker skills and encourage them for a particular type of credential through appropriate credentialing bodies.
Design thinking
Just like an architect, it is necessary to optimize the workflow and manage training within the organization. Learning resources support the conscious development of skills, help to overcome challenges, improve performance, and resolve conflicts. During the course, learning and development professionals may have to find a common ground with stakeholders and employees having conflicting interests.
Teamwork forms an important part and it is quite essential to design employee development strategies accordingly. The learning plan must address the business need and employees’ target as well. So, having a design thinking mindset with openness for new learnings is essential to gain success in professional life and personal career growth.
Innovation
Professionals today are interested in learning cross-disciplinary skills to strengthen their employability. As an L&D professional, it is critical to acknowledge these change waves, be innovation-ready, and meet tricky targets. One must have problem-solving skills and formulate new and innovative strategies to welcome the enthusiasm of employees and accommodate their learning curiosities in a way that helps the organization as well.
To summarize…
To stay relevant in the leadership role, it is necessary to walk the talk. Be the one who can embrace change and invest in self-learning to promote the learning and performance ecosystem within the organization.
