The benefits of continued learning within your organization

At Online Dialogue, we think development is very important. Besides the fact that we like to keep up to date with the latest tools, psychological insights, automation, understanding how best to use statistics and culture change within companies, we also like to share our knowledge. For example, our colleagues often appear as speakers at events and we have an extensive training program.

Unfortunately, we see that enrollment is declining. Not only with us, but last week I was at an event by Springest (training comparison platform) and there I spoke to all kinds of providers who are experiencing the same thing. Why is that? In February of this year CXL a survey of 462 ‘marketing leaders-CMOs, VPs of marketing, marketing directors’ in the United States. And what did it turn out? It's not so easy to just get training or education from your employer.

Why do so few employees use their budgets?

Currently, only 1 in 5 of those surveyed uses his or her training budget despite the fact that budgets are growing and thus there is more money for employee development.

According to the study, growth in development budgets is particularly evident in larger companies. But within these companies, own skills and knowledge of the team are overestimated, leading to training being considered unnecessary. At 74% of those surveyed, it is not the employee himself but the manager who is responsible for training employees.

A manager has different interests and questions when it comes to training a team. For a manager, team development is more important than the development of the individual. A manager is faced with questions such as: do we need to train everyone? And once everyone is trained are we not already behind? As well as the question of whether training is good enough? And what a training is going to add to day-to-day operations? A common fear that employers seem to have is that an employee will be trained internally and then leave the company. But confusion due to internal communication, such as about budget and available time, is the biggest cause of not taking a training course.

For smaller companies, the situation is different. One of the biggest reasons smaller companies do not allow employees to take training is lack of resources to absorb the hours spent on training. As a result, employees fail to attend training.

For both employee and employer, attending training has positive effects.

Taking training and education courses is incredibly good for yourself and for your business. Attending training is associated with a variety of positive consequences such as improved job performance, new skills and higher commitment. Training has been found to have a positive effect on the performance of individuals and teams (Aguinis & Kraiger, 2008). So in addition to personal development, there is definitely benefit for companies to have employees develop themselves through training.

In addition, the benefit to organizations is that training creates a positive work atmosphere, employees are more motivated, work more effectively and are more knowledgeable. Also very important; employees who attend training courses stay with an organization longer (Aguinis & Kraiger, 2008).

Encourage attending training

CXL's survey found that 66% of companies plan to spend more money on development in 2019. One of our clients indicated that if employees use 90% of their development budget they get extra money the following year. Very good!

My advice to these companies is not to force their employees to take a certain course, but rather give them freedom of choice from training. In addition, as a manager, be involved, ask the employee what he has learned and how the team can use that knowledge. I also hope that the internal application process will be made a lot easier at companies. Therefore, with this article I would like to encourage everyone to follow training and courses, after all, there is a budget for this at many companies.

Need inspiration?

We have a range of educational courses for everyone involved in conversion optimization! Are you responsible for driving conversion optimization in your company but don't know where to start? Are you already working on conversion optimization but would like to get more insights from your experiments? Or do you want to know more about psychology to influence (online) customer behavior? Then you have come to the right place for a training or course at Online Dialogue.

Inge Muijshondt on the conversion specialist training:

“Inspiring and interesting course given by professionals with a lot of love and enthusiasm for their profession. We received many practical tools to get started ourselves. Highly recommended!”

References:
Aguinis, Herman & Kraiger, Kurt (2008). Benefits of Training and Development for Individuals and Teams, Organizations, and Society.