As I’m sure you know, and as I have already written on extensively, the importance of the workforce cannot be overstated in.  Finding and hiring the absolute best people for the job, regardless of the field, is a perpetual desire of any manager, and works to maximize your business’s potential. A few good hires can revolutionize the way your institution operates, and mean the difference between profitability and loss.  In our past articles, we’ve explored the hiring process extensively and touched on onboarding a handful of times; but now I thought it would be appropriate that we explore various ways your employees can improve their individual skills and expertise.  Hiring should not be the end of the process as far as an employee’s skills are concerned.  There is of course the onboarding process which usually contains some form of training and orients employees to their new role and introduces them to your prescribed workflow and best practices, but following the onboarding process management should not be content to idle their workforce. Rather, management should promote constant improvement through professional development and training programs. 

Whether it's onboarding training for new team members or professional training for veterans, learning and professional development should be a constant progression in a business.  We all know that in basically all fields enterprise changes rapidly, perhaps now more than ever.  For instance, processes that only a year ago were industry standards could become obsolete and dated seemingly overnight.  Likewise, team dynamics and general principles of leadership and communication can always be improved.  For these reasons it is important to nurture your team’s development and to ensure that you are providing them with the training and guidance, they need to succeed in your area of practice.  Your competitors are very likely developing their teams’ skills, so in order to remain competitive or to gain an edge, it is prudent for you to do the same and constantly seek to improve the abilities of your team.

Owing in large part to the increasingly niche skill-sets required of employees, keeping track of who to train, how to train them, and how to track their training can be a rather complex practice.  As with just about anything else in business, learning and professional development are best managed with a logistical approach.  Whether it's simple onboarding training or advanced strategic professional development, you are best served by applying scrupulous planning and tracking practices to ensure the best results and to provide you with the information necessary to further develop your training programs.

You may be wondering how exactly a logical and scrupulous approach can be applied in the domain of training and professional development, so to you, I would offer digital enterprise, and specifically Sharepoint. Microsoft Sharepoint is a powerful multipurpose intranet system that connects employees and employers over a completely digital environment and is absolutely excellent for collaboration. Here at Infowise, we’ve developed an expansion of Sharepoint called Ultimateforms which introduces to the program the ability to create and customize dynamic forms that integrate seamlessly to the broader Sharepoint and Office 365 environment. You can solve just about any logistical problem possible in this workspace with Ultimateforms, and that includes professional development and training logistics.

With Ultimateforms, you can create a complete professional development center that tracks the development of each employee and aggregates all progress data for the viewing of management. Delivery of and review of the training content can be all be done in Ultimateforms and can integrate with existing onboarding or other systems relevant to professional development. We understand that your business may require specific customized forms based on its unique needs, but if you are looking for a more general solution, Ultimateforms comes with a myriad of prebuilt business solutions as well, including solutions geared towards professional development. Our in-house Sharepoint experts have produced a series of webinars on various Ultimateforms solutions, including professional development, so if you would like to learn more about the software I welcome you to take a look- Learning management on Sharepoint. We also offer a rather extensive demo program so that prospective clients can determine whether or not Ultimateforms is the right tool for the job before spending, so I welcome you to sign up for a demo as well. Until next time!