Are you thinking of up-skilling your team members?

Luckily, more organizations are utilizing LMS platforms, so up-skilling is easy.

However, it’s also easy to make mistakes, so this article will highlight the top 5 mistakes to avoid when up-skilling your team members.

5 Mistakes When Up-Skilling Team Members

1. Assuming everyone needs the same thing

Every member of a team has unique strengths and weaknesses, career goals, and interests. Therefore, team members will also resonate with different learning methods, so the process of up-skilling should not look the same for everyone. Instead, managers or team leaders should customize the learning to each member. The teaching should be based on a proper understanding of a team member’s skills.

2. Not knowing where you stand

Up-skilling should be based on a true understanding of one's skills and performance gaps. The easiest way to identify where skills and performance gaps exist is to determine what your team knows and what your team doesn't know. This is where assessments and surveys can help uncover these answers. From there, you can develop customized learning that will look different for every member of the team.

3. Not knowing roles and requirements

Up-skilling should be focused on closing the gaps in skills and performance. In efforts to close these gaps, you should consider what those gaps are linked to. For example, what responsibilities or positions require the skills that a team member is lacking. Therefore, you must know what roles and requirements your team needs precisely, which also means it’s essential to understand what responsibilities go alongside those requirements and what skills will be required to accomplish them. An LMS system can provide a task needs analysis, which can help figure out what responsibilities and skills go along with the roles and responsibilities.

4. Not providing support

Learning should be a continuous process. Up-skilling is meant to develop a team's abilities and teach new skills. Therefore, providing support is critical to the success of the training. Providing support will look different for every team member based on their needs. Some examples of providing support include a mentorship program, a peer coaching program, or a social learning program through an LMS.

5. Not accepting feedback

You must listen to your team’s feedback to see what is working and what isn’t working. Feedback will not only make your team successful in developing skills, but it will also save time and money. Feedback is critical, whether it’s feedback on what the employees want to develop, their career goals, or how to support them better. Feedback will also make your team feel more valued within the organization because their opinions are being heard. Ultimately, feedback will help you create an accurate up-skilling strategy.

Wrap up

Up-skilling your team members can be a stressful process. However, up-skilling is needed to develop your team's skills and continuously improve. Avoiding these 5 up-skilling mistakes will help make this process seamless and straightforward. If you are thinking of up-skilling your team members, have fun with it and remember to avoid these common mistakes!