Dive Brief:
- According to several reports, the cost to train an employee can range between $700 to as much as $1,200, says Daniel Dowling, a coach and contributor to Fast Company. However, recent McKinsey research reports dismal employee satisfaction with traditional training; only 1 in 4 think training helps with performance. The future of professional development is with career coaches who get better results.
- Dowling shares how introducing even small ideas to employees can have a large impact on their attitudes about work and learning new things. To make new behaviors a habit, he advises working with employees for a minimum of a month.
- Coaching can have a greater impact on changing behaviors of employees, putting the investment to work.
Dive Insight:
As companies look for more ways to enhance training programs, the use of career coaches makes sense. Professional development of employees is not about sitting a group of people in a classroom and expecting them to learn new things in a few days. It takes a concerted effort by coaching professionals and management teams to continually reinforce new and better ways of doing things in the entire experience of employees.
The 2016 ICF Global Coaching Study shows that this industry is growing and influencing human resources and management on a greater scale. Around 23% of managers are already using coaching skills and have received approximately 200 hours of formal training. As more leaders realize the value of coaching and similar forms of on-demand learning in the professional development world, it's expected that this will become mainstream.
