As a leader, you want your team to grow and thrive in their careers. But how can you ensure that they have the relevant, up-to-date skills and knowledge that they need to succeed in a changing world? In this article, you will learn how to design and implement effective career development workshops for your team, using the following steps:
Before you plan a career development workshop, it is important to understand your team's goals, strengths, gaps, and interests. To assess these needs, you can use surveys, interviews, performance reviews, feedback sessions, or self-assessments. By asking open-ended questions such as what are their short-term and long-term career goals or what skills or knowledge they want to improve or acquire, you can gain insight into their aspirations, challenges, and preferences. Additionally, you should ask about the current or future trends or opportunities in their field or industry as well as how they prefer to learn and develop themselves. Finally, it is important to identify any barriers or obstacles that may prevent them from reaching their potential.
Having a written development plan is critical to advancing your team members. Documenting team and individual goals memorializes the steps required for your team to advance. Remember to listen to your team about the obstacles they’re facing. You may not be able to resolve all the challenges they face, but acknowledging them and assisting where you can will show your team you support them. Finally, it’s important to remember that your team can’t advance if their leader doesn’t grow. Developing your team also means developing yourself.
When defining the objectives and outcomes of your team's career development workshop, make sure they are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For instance, by the end of the workshop, participants should be able to identify their career values, interests, and strengths; create a personalized career development plan with SMART goals and action steps; and use online tools and resources to explore and learn new skills or topics.
When designing a career development workshop, it's important to choose the most suitable format and content for your objectives. You can use different formats, like lectures, discussions, activities, exercises, games, simulations, case studies, or demonstrations. Additionally, you can use videos, slides, handouts, worksheets, quizzes, or assessments to provide relevant content. For example, videos or slides can introduce concepts or models of career development such as the Holland Code or Career Anchors. Discussions or activities can help your team explore their career values, interests and strengths with tools such as the Values Card Sort or Career Interest Inventory. Exercises or games can be used to help your team create their career development plans with techniques like SMART Goal Setting or Career Bingo.
In order to deliver your career development workshop effectively, you need to properly prepare the logistics, such as the venue, equipment, materials, agenda, and evaluation. Additionally, you should also equip yourself with presentation skills, communication skills, and confidence. When facilitating the workshop, it is important to set ground rules and create a positive and safe atmosphere. You should also manage the time, pace, and flow of the workshop while encouraging participation and feedback. Furthermore, you must be prepared to handle questions and challenges. To break the ice and build rapport with your team, you can use icebreakers or warm-ups such as Two Truths and a Lie or Human Bingo. Questions or prompts can be used to stimulate discussion and reflection; for example, the What, So What, Now What or STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) model. Praise or recognition can be used to motivate and appreciate your team; for instance, Shout Out or Appreciation Circle. Lastly, you can give out a Certificate of Achievement.
After delivering a career development workshop, it's important to follow up and support your team to ensure they apply what they learned and reach their goals. This can be done through emails, calls, meetings, coaching, mentoring, or peer learning. Provide regular, constructive, and personalized feedback and guidance to your team. You could send emails or calls to check in with them and see how they are progressing with their plans, what challenges they are facing, and what support they need. Additionally, you can schedule meetings or coaching sessions to review their goals and action steps, celebrate their successes, and address any issues or difficulties. To further help your team with career development, create or join mentoring or peer learning programs that connect them with other experts or colleagues who can offer advice.
To me, this is the most important step in the process - besides the initial goal definition of course. Make sure that your team members actually get the opportunity to practice the new skills they have learnt. So keep in mind their individual learning journeys whenever you assign tasks or projects. Providing feedback along the way is essential as well. As a leader you should have regular check-ins with your team members to discuss their progress. In an environment of trust, getting feedback from colleagues is also very helpful.
All these points are reality important not just to increase the productivity of the employee within the company but also to boost the morale of the employee and makes them up to date with the current skill requirements in the industry which makes them feel valued to grow loyalty towards the company. Continuous training and improvement in skill would help company also to retain the resource and spend less on training new employees every now and then if you have retained your experienced resources.
Workshops can be a great tool for career development but there are other ways of learning new skills that you might want to consider. Studies show: the more participatory the method the higher the knowledge retention rate - while people remember about 5% of what they hear in a lecture this rate is about 75% when practicing is involved. Consider including as many opportunities for practicing as possible, e.g. taking on new tasks or projects or even corporate volunteering opportunities. If you offer regular check-ins and reflection meetings as a support you maximize the return on the investment.
As a leader I believe in mentoring as a tool in helping younger generations grow. There are lots of people who I have admired and looked up to because I love their leadership style, how fast & what they have achieved in their career paths. Most of them do not know I'm looking up to them & some do. However living an exemplary life, being a leader worthy to emulate is a major game changer. Just like it is said, don't do as I say, do as I do. BEING an example is a major HOW. By seeing what you do, they also BECOME like you. So it is very expedient that as leaders we lead by example. This is one way which is very neglected but very important in development especially for newbies. What they see you the leader do becomes the standard for them.
Make sure you know the industry changes yourself, and adapt and update training as necessary. But also encourage self-discovery for your team. If they are allowed to research and learn on their own, it allows for the team to engage each other with the new information they have learned.