In today's tight labor market, investing in your firm's talent by providing valuable development programs can be a game changer for ensuring the success of your business, both now and in the future. Despite massive strides in the adoption of technology within the accounting industry, more than 300,000 U.S. accountants and auditors have left their jobs in the past two years, representing a 17% decline - and the dwindling number of college students coming into the field can't fill the gap. Luckily, you can recruit talent with non-traditional accounting backgrounds to overcome this challenge - but doing so requires providing the education and support they need to be successful. And while you focus on developing and delivering impactful training to new talent, it's important to also pay attention to providing ongoing training to your more experienced employees to help them excel in their roles and to retain them at your firm.
While creating effective training programs that don't overstretch your time and resources can be challenging, investing in your team's professional development well worth the effort. Effective training boosts confidence, morale, and has a positive impact on retention. In fact, 69% of new hires report they would be more likely to stay with a company for at least three years if they received a great onboarding experience, and 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in staff development. In a rapidly changing industry where employee retention is being prioritized, it's necessary to find ways to keep employees engaged and empowered no matter where they are in their career journey.
Here are a few considerations to developing valuable learning programs that drive impact and engage your team:
Start with a 'why' – the business goal.
Many companies jump into creating educational content without defining the problem or challenge they're aiming to solve and the desired outcome of overcoming it. Without a clear, defined business goal, training programs are likely to fall short. To get clear on your objectives, create goals that are specific, measurable, relevant, and achievable. As an example, you could have the goal of onboarding talent effectively. The desired outcome? Your new employee feels confident and empowered to deliver client work within their first month on the job.
Second, identify the 'who.'
Once goals are clearly defined, it's crucial to determine 'who' you plan to target with your training program. View your employees as different audience segments, such as by their role or function in the firm (i.e. accountants, payroll specialists, controllers, etc.). Once you have identified your different audience buckets, you can create your learner personas. Learner personas are prototypes of learners that share common characteristics, such as training goals, experience level, job responsibilities, or skills required for being successful. For example, teams may have a mix of junior staff, senior staff, and managers, all of whom play different roles and require different experiences and skill sets to do their jobs effectively. The goal here is to clearly understand your audiences so you can customize your content for maximum relevance, ensuring it reaches the right people at the right time.
Third, solidify the learning outcomes.
Once audiences are clearly defined, it's important to cultivate clear learning outcomes that are both actionable and measurable. This process begins with identifying tasks that have a pragmatic path for progress, such as working toward a specific business goal or overcoming a challenge. From there, make sure there's a tangible task and procedure that employees can follow to meet their expected outcomes. As a best practice, the learning outcomes should reflect your goals, but not be identical to them. In the earlier example of onboarding employees with the goal of conducting client work within the first month, specific outcomes could include being able to describe accounting principles and skillfully using accounting platforms to track client's financial health.
In conclusion.
Learning and development programs will look different for each business, but at their core, these programs all aim to help employees achieve their business goals across every stage of their career journey. To get the best, sustainable results for all career paths and levels, learning opportunities should be hands-on, engaging, and relevant to your desired audience - and the training material should be easy to measure and engage with. With the right programs in place, learning can serve as a lever for growth, helping your employees and your firm thrive.
About the Author
Jaclyn Anku is the ProAdvisor Training and Certification Leader for Intuit. She is a small business and accounting community enthusiast with more than 10 years in developing scalable, compelling initiatives at leading SaaS companies, honing her ability to drive a dual bottom line.
When Jaclyn is not busy creating programs that educate, motivate, and break the mold, you can find her around the Bay Area with her husband and two beautiful girls.
Speaking of Training
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