By Amit Jindal, New Delhi: Sustainable learning and growth, being the inherent needs of all the career conscious people, has always garnered attention and much work has been done to understand the better ways of facilitating it.
Manpower Consultants and Deloitte research studies have found that millennials (Gen-X: Those who were born after 1982 essentially reaching the new millennial in their teens) are more inclined towards continuous improvement in the areas of their professional activities. Some of the key drivers for millennials at work place are:
Sense of purpose
Variety of experiences
Utilization of skills
Professional development
Good work life balance
Opportunity to progress and be a leader
Strong sense of self control over their career
In light of the observation above it becomes imperative for the organizations to device strategies that cater to the needs of the current work force; millennials now have significant share in the current workforce.
It is equally interesting to observe the rise of startups in the current environment. Agile and fragile at times, flexible and fast, the startups face many challenges in fundraising, product development, promotion, sales and that in recruitment as well.
Too many uncertainties in startups’ life put them at a dark spot when it comes to making choice of a potential employer. Hence, it becomes imperative for the entrepreneurs to be very innovative in their approach for attracting and nurturing talents.
The pointers mentioned above will clearly guide the startup companies to have a plan how to attract potential recruits. Apart from all the perks and approaches like Work from Home, Flexible work timings, fun at work, appreciation, ESOPS, and incentives, one very important benefit that startups can offer is learning opportunities on the job.
If startups can build an environment for continuous learning and align that with the personal goals of these employees, the employees will ensure better outcomes.
Some of the ways with which startups can facilitate such learning environment are:
Mentoring: Help them with your experience and empower them. Right kind of guidance can really do wonders to the employees and build trust.
Self Learning: Use tools to facilitate better knowledge exchange and increased interaction among people in your organization. The repository build in this matter will only serve as an easily accessible knowledge pools. There are tools that have been specifically designed for creating a network for knowledge. They not only empower your employees with knowledge but encourage them to share more. Such tools also offer various security features to maintain confidentiality and control of data and content.
Encourage in office discussions: Casual conversations on various topics of interest and the technologies passively increase awareness among your employees and a healthy competition to stay ahead will push them to explore more.
Cross functional training: Achieving professional progression is something that has been rated as one of the most important drivers by significant number of employees. Hence, this needs to be addressed. Cross functional trainings and leadership development trainings give an employee enough confidence in self and the organization. The readiness for the career progression is something everyone aspires for and such kind of support enhances their trust in their company.
It is important for a startup to be cost conscious and hence making spends on training and development is a tricky choice as the saying goes: Once the CFO said we are spending so much on the training of our employees what if they leave, the CEO said, what if we don’t and they stay?
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About the Author: Amit Jindal has extensive experience with Process Transition, Team and Process Management, Risk management and compliance, data and information security (ISMS), and data analysis for process improvement. At present, he is heading a startup in the Edtech space (Company name: Candid Cohort, Brand: Quizential). Quizential is a platform to ascertain comprehensive and equitable quality education and provide learning opportunities for all. Amit also manages Delhi Chapter of Learning and Development Global, a professional network of Learning and Development practitioners connected digitally.
