It should come as no surprise that providing professional development opportunities for your employees often results in new found innovation, creative problem solving, increased levels of productivity, and even upward mobility within the company. As a chief officer or project manager, here’s how you can support continued education for your IT team.

1. Provide The Resources & Time

If your team has to take it upon themselves to continue their education, chances are they’ll struggle with finding the right course and fitting it into their schedule among their many responsibilities. One way you can ensure your employees don’t get stuck or remain stagnant in their skill set, is by incorporating education into their work. Offering a set amount of hours of uninterrupted, paid learning not only motivates employees to seek growth, it makes it realistic. Whether it’s learning a new software tool or a strategies on improving performance in general, enabling your team to continue to develop will allow your company to keep up with the pace of the always evolving world of Information Technology.   

2. Tailor it to Your Work Culture

Continued learning doesn’t have to look the same for every business or IT team. It can be formal, informal, in the form of a quarterly retreat, weekly seminars, or online classes. What’s important is that you tailor it to your work culture. Depending on the size of your company, it may even be beneficial for employees to offer up topics they’re interested in and start from there.  

3. Lead By Example

Before you can establish a culture of continuous learning you must first create an environment where one is not afraid to ask questions. It can be scary to admit you are weak in a certain area or don’t exactly know how to do something. However, just because one works in the field of IT, doesn’t necessitate that they are skilled in it’s every specialty.  

4. Set and Share Goals

One way you can lead by example is to set and share your own goals for increasing your knowledge, both short and long term. This can be in the form of an action plan that details how you are going to reach these goals. Once you have established a means of providing educational opportunities, it’s beneficial to follow up with your team’s goals to ensure that there needs were met as well as learn how your employees plan to implement what they learned. When your team understands what they’re doing and why, they’ll be more engaged in the process and more productive overall. 

At Number8, we connect companies with IT talent and software developers that are fully trained in product development. By encouraging talent to come up with creative solutions, they remain motivated and positively contribute to a healthy company culture. If you’re interested in learning more about Number8 and what we do, give us a call at 502-212-0978.