Soft Skills Your Online Training Program Should Focus On

For an organization to grow, its employees need a repertoire of task-related skills. An HR personnel, for example, needs to know how to process payroll so that employees are paid on time. However, beyond technical skills, which HR personnel do you think organizations should retain when times are tough? The one who is always willing to give a helping hand or the one who refuses to admit mistakes and is inflexible?

Soft skills, like knowing how to get along with coworkers, problem-solving, and time management, are just as important for workplace success as technical skills. Therefore, they should also be part of career professional training programs. Here is a list of soft skills that employers can focus on for e-learning programs:

Communication Skills

Good communication skills open doors to opportunities in the workplace. Effective collaboration allows teammates to empathize with their peers, resolve conflicts faster, and retain customers. Employees must possess a set of secondary skills that make them better communicators – skills that enable them to express their ideas and articulate their thoughts with precision.

Soft skills, like active listening, speaking, and body language can be improved with the right training. And not all of it has to be conducted in a physical setting. To create an online training program that helps employees improve their communication skills, ask yourself questions, like:

• Can your employees convey their ideas and opinions effectively during business meetings?
• Are their emails too informal?

To improve these skills, your online training can feature character-based simulations that allow employees to interact with different personnel in a variety of settings.

Time Management Skills

Time management is a crucial soft skill that focuses on setting priorities, meeting deadlines, and staying on top of tasks. Are distractions keeping employees from completing tasks within deadlines? How long does it take them to outline the steps required for certain tasks? When do they start working after they clock in?

To help individuals manage their time better, ask them what’s keeping them from completing tasks on time. Better yet, let them set their own milestones, track their progress, and use the data as a foundation to design your program. 

Decision Making Skills

Decision making is all about getting things done. However, some employees have a hard time making the right decisions in a timely manner. An inability to make decisions often results in conflicts going unresolved. An online program that improves these skills can include branching scenarios that allow individuals to gauge the consequences of their actions without the fear of judgment or risk. Make sure that your program features real-world scenarios that puts employees in challenging situations.

Problem Solving Skills

Being able to think on your feet while solving problems is considered an important trait in the corporate world. This goes double for project managers and other employees in leadership positions, who should have the ability to take charge of situations and guide their teammates during difficult times. For an e-learning program, focus on one problem at a time, identify the goals, and incorporate game mechanics (badges and rewards) that inspire workers to do their best. 

Work Ethic

Everyone, from the CEO to entry-level workers, must possess a strong work ethic to help an organization achieve its goals. Either employees exhibit a strong work ethic to strive to complete tasks in a professional manner, or they don’t. While work ethic is difficult to quantify, it can still be improved with proper training. For example, a reward or incentive-based training program depending on factors like discipline and teamwork can motivate employees to improve these skills.

Adaptability and Flexibility

Organizations need to change in order to evolve. And employees need to adapt. Flexible employees are willing to come out of their comfort zone and modify their approach to tasks depending on the demands of each situation. This can be anything from delegating tasks to focusing on priorities or implementing alternate solutions for problems as they arise.

To achieve this, include choice-based training simulations in your training program in which workers can choose how they react to certain situations and learn how their actions produce certain outcomes.

A workforce is as strong as its weakest link. Getting career training online can equip your workforce with skills that they need to grow. Make sure that the skills you incorporate into your training program are relevant so that your employees know how to implement them when the situation arises in the workplace.