The 3 Types of Skills Development Courses Companies Must Include In Their Training Strategies
Every corporate training session should end with one thing: an actionable skill.
Whether you’re training employees on standard business practices or conducting channel partner training to provide education about your products, the takeaway should be a skill that applies to your stakeholders’ regular work. However, creating a robust and impactful training strategy requires having a clear picture of the variety of skills team members need to succeed in their roles. Companies cannot limit course offerings to company process training or product information. They must also provide courses that educate their teams on effective management strategies, how to develop new ideas, and effective communication.
The best way to build a framework for your robust and comprehensive corporate learning and development program is to break it into three strategic initiatives. In the corporate learning field, skills are often divided into three groups:
- Cognitive
- Technical
- Interpersonal
However, this grouping is not unique to the industry. This practice of classifying skills into three groups goes as far back as ancient Greece. Aristotle himself grouped skills into three categories:
- Episteme, which refers to scientific knowledge or knowledge of indisputable facts
- Techne, which refers (unsurprisingly) to technical skills related to one’s craft
- Phronesis, which is most often associated with practical wisdom that directs action
Your company doesn’t need a deep dive into Greek philosophy to see the value of this three-pronged approach to skills development. Consider the impact that cognitive, technical, and interpersonal training could have on one employee at the manager level. Cognitive training will help them be better problem solvers, technical training makes them more adept within their field, and interpersonal training enables them to develop an effective team.
Let’s dive into these three types of skills development initiatives and discuss how your company can start building them using LMS software.
What is skills development?
Skills development is a broad term for the process of identifying skills gaps, building competencies through training, and ensuring the ongoing growth of those skills. Corporate training is a type of skills development. The purpose of skills development is to equip stakeholders with the skills they need to be more effective at work, which, ultimately, will yield a more competitive company overall.
Cognitive Skills Training
Provide courses that improve your team’s ability to think creatively, solve problems, and rise to challenges. These courses may be more broadly applicable across your organization and can be used to train employees, sales teams, partners, and customers alike.
Cognitive training in the context of corporate learning and development could include a course about creativity or a session about brainstorming. Cognitive skills sessions are a great way for stakeholders to learn by doing. For example, cognitive skills include things like memory, problem-solving, and focus. By adding interactive elements to courses, companies can help learners practice those skills during training. Quizzes, polls, and videos give learners the chance to determine whether or not the lessons they learned during the session stuck with them. Training managers can assign problem-solving questions for learners to answer as they work through courses.
And adding these interactive elements doesn’t have to be difficult. By using the ExpertusONE digital skills platform for skills training, managers can incorporate interactive elements in just a few clicks. Our rapid-authoring LMS tool makes it possible to add interactive training elements to courses in just a handful of clicks. It’s xAPI compliant and doesn’t require any advanced coding skills to use. This way, companies can add microlearning to courses to boost knowledge retention and increase impact.
Technical Skills
Most companies have a clear handle on the importance of technical skills training, especially in industries like manufacturing or healthcare, which require adherence to strict compliance regulations.
To create a comprehensive corporate learning and development strategy, companies must offer specific and actionable courses that your team can take in order to develop technical skills that are relevant to their role or a future role they would like to take on. Technical skills will vary based on the company, industry, products, and types of teams. It may not be necessary for your company’s entire stakeholder network to take all available technical training. And, even further, assigning such a high volume of technical training will exhaust your team members. Instead, provide each stakeholder with technical training that is relevant to their role and their specialization. Learning plans should be personalized and tailored to the team member’s needs, instead of a single, blanket-style plan for all.
This doesn’t have to mean added administration time for your organization. Personalization can be streamlined and automated using artificial intelligence. The ExpertusONE enterprise LMS uses AI and machine learning to provide learners with personalized course recommendations based on their job titles, interests, and courses their peers are taking.
Interpersonal Skills
Perhaps the most complicated type of training is interpersonal skills training because this can vary greatly depending on the type of role a person plays at work, their personality, and even cultural differences. However, interpersonal skills training is essential for a thriving and effective team. Training can include subjects like communication, conflict management, cultural communication, and other skills that help team members interact more effectively in the workplace.
But let’s look at a practical example of interpersonal skills at work: sales team training.
Your sales team may be the most people-first department within your organization because their core objective is to interact with prospects and customers in a way that builds trust and solidifies the relationship. Interpersonal skills are critical. But your sales team isn’t going to benefit from a single interpersonal skills course or video session. They need practice. They need sales coaching and mentoring. And you can provide it with a digital LMS platform. With the ExpertusONE LMS, your entire training experience flows together seamlessly in a single system.
Sales coaching and mentoring sessions can take place using our integrated Meetings feature. These one-on-one sessions between a manager and a team member can later be converted into courses for others to watch and learn from, especially if the content covered is broadly applicable across the organization.
Your corporate learning and development program should include training for these three categories of skills, but you must take it further than simply providing a variety of courses. With a digital LMS platform, companies can add interactive elements to courses, personalize the learning experience, and enable coaching.
Want to see how an LMS platform can improve your company’s skills training outcomes? Contact us today for a free demo.
