The Importance of Learning and Professional Development: Productivity

The Importance of Learning and Professional Development: Productivity

In the last article in our series on Learning and Professional Development, we'll be discussing employee productivity and the direct impact learning and professional development has on this part of your business.

If you've missed the previous three entries in our Learning and Professional Development series, you check them out here:

• The Importance of Professional Development: Return on Investment

• The Importance of Learning and Professional Development: Employee Retention

What is Employee Productivity?

According to the Global Journal of Commerce and Management Perspective, Employee productivity is the measure of output per unit of input economically and the log of net sales over total employees. Employee production is measured differently throughout varies types of companies or departments within each company. If you're a retail company you're likely evaluate purely on sales, if you are a customer service department, you may be measured by the amount of calls, emails, or chats you handle, your customer satisfaction scores and the speed with which you deal with customer inquiries. Regardless of how you measure it, employee production is the key to earning revenue.

The Facts

Did you know that surveys on workforce mobility reveal that, on average, it takes around eight months for a new hire to reach full productivity after starting a job? Investing in training employees on decision making, teamwork, problem-solving, interpersonal relations, and other professional skills has favorable impacts on the organizations’ level of growth, as well as positively impacting the performance of the employees. When employees receive training and professional development they are given the tools to become more resourceful to effectively handle their job responsibilities and grow into other job roles.

Training Cycle

In the figure below, we see the relationship cycle developed by Rohan and Madhumita in 2012 in a study on the impacts of learning and professional development. Illustrated, you can see that when you offer training to employees, their productivity increases, leading to more revenue. When revenue increases it allows you to invest more of your budget into training employees effectively. This cycle is an exceptional representation of the impact that training and development has on companies because it shows that training and professional development can influence a multitude of areas and departments.

Takeaways

Investing in training and professional development for employees can have a large influence on your company. Whether you need to attract top talent, develop leaders, or increase your revenue gains, it all starts with training. Well trained leaders engage employees, engaged employees are more productive, and higher productivity equals an increase in ROI. The formula is quite simple, however, getting started is the hard part. United Training can assist in creating a training plan for your team so you can begin to reap the rewards of a professional development program. Our experienced instructors are more than capable of growing the professional skills of your team while also developing your next wave of leaders.

Invest in your employees and leadership teams today by visiting our Leadership and Professional Development page to see our available courses.