Continuing education isn’t just good for learners, it’s also good for employers when they encourage their employees to pursue professional development and ongoing training for both technical and soft skills. Whether it means providing tuition subsidies and reimbursements or just making educational goal-setting a part of the job, there is much that employers can do to get the following benefits that come with encouraging continuing education.
1. Better-performing employees.
Ongoing continuing education not only teaches technical skills that are often needed for effective job performance, it also helps employees learn soft skills like effective communication that will also boost their ability to do their jobs well. Continuing education is often needed because of the rapidly changing nature of many jobs, and employees who don’t continue their education may quickly become a drain on your department or company as the pace of technology continues to accelerate.
2. Longer employee retention.
While many employers fear that employees will take their newly learned skills elsewhere, the opposite is actually true. Supporting continuing education makes employees feel valued and more likely to stay at the company that provided that education than to move on to a different employer that may not value continuing education. With average employees staying at the same job for only three to five years, even an additional year of retention could make a huge difference in costs and more than make up for any financial investment in continuing education.
Employers that encourage and invest in continuing education for employees have a better company culture.
3. Impact on company culture.
Encouraging continuing education can positively impact the company’s culture by fostering a drive toward continual improvement that spills over from the personal into the collective company consciousness. After all, a focus on the importance of continuing education dovetails right into a focus on continual improvement in the workplace, which will only lead to bottom line improvements in functioning for the company overall and could even lead to greater innovation.
4. Easier succession planning.
As employees take advantage of professional development opportunities, it will become clear that some employees have leadership potential along with the willingness to pursue more advanced skills that would be needed to advance to higher positions within the company. These insights can be incorporated into succession planning efforts, and with some communication, you will have better prepared employees when the time comes to promote them.
5. Higher profits.
Employees who perform better and are more productive will impact the company’s bottom line positively, leading to all kinds of advances that will produce and sell more of the goods and services offered. The relatively modest cost of continuing education courses could set off a chain reaction of increased productivity, increased sales and innovation that every company needs to remain relevant in an industry over a long period of time.
CCSU offers continuing education courses for many industries as well as training for other skills like technology and soft skills that are needed by just about any industry. View open courses to see options that can help your employees meet their educational and career goals.