The marketing industry is always evolving. How does your organization keep employees up-to-date with your industry’s trends, strategies, and best practices?
To answer this question, Stukent asked HR managers and CEOs for insights on how they keep their employees on industry’s leading edge. From incentivizing upskilling to offering LinkedIn Learning classes, organizations have great ways to upgrade employees’ skills and stay current with industry.
When it comes to learning and development, simulations are a growing trend. Simulations allow users to immerse themselves in real-world scenarios and situations, allowing employees to learn new skills without affecting a brand, reputation, or bottom line.
Stukent offers over 20 corporate learning simulations for onboarding, upskilling, leadership training, team building, and more. To learn more about our training solutions, visit the Stukent L&D website.
Here are 10 other ways organizations keep their employees current:
- Send informative newsletter emails
- Incentivize employee upskilling efforts
- Make time for your team to learn
- Support employee development with an LMS
- Invest in the personal development of teams
- Support employees in creating their own side projects
- Use LinkedIn Learning
- Create a reading list for the team
- Attend conferences and network with others
- Implement on-the-job training
1. Send Informative Newsletter Emails
One way our organization has helped our employees stay current … is to send out informative newsletters and emails every week! This is a simple, yet extremely effective method that can be beneficial to everyone in your organization.
It’s important to hire, or assign, an employee who is able to identify important articles and new skills across their industry, [ones] that will be useful for employees to learn more about. … [Be sure to] add some flair to the email formatting and theme! These emails, or newsletters, should also be planned for a specific day of the week, such as every Friday.
Chris Hunter, ServiceTitan
2. Incentivize Employee Upskilling Efforts
Our team incentivizes our employees’ efforts to upskill themselves in marketing. We ensure that our marketing team stays current with marketing trends and industry skills by giving them access to different training, classes, and seminars and rewarding them through non-cash incentives and digital workspace perks. Positive recognition is a powerful way to encourage employees to improve and develop their skills while keeping them satisfied and productive at work.
Nunzio Ross, Majesty Coffee
3. Make Time for Your Team to Learn
[Our marketing team is] encouraged to take 15 minutes out of the work day to look over new marketing trends, learn new methods, improve on a skill, and keep up-to-date with changes in the industry. Each team member summarizes what we have learned from our research and shares it with the rest of the team on a digital channel. This way, we all keep up-to-date on the changes in each sector and are accountable to stay current.Liz Hogan, Find My Profession
4. Support Employee Development with an LMS
An LMS — or Learning Management System — is a tool that is employed to support employee personal development and career growth. We have implemented the LMS system as a part of our HR efforts to improve our learning and development plans for employees. An LMS has helped us identify skill gaps, provide required training for employees, and have personal development plans aligned with required industry and career goals.
Michael Nemeroff, Rush Order Tees
5. Invest in the Personal Development of Teams
We’ve invested in personal development opportunities for our marketing team. This can include online courses, webinars, certification opportunities, and anything else we deem relevant. We encourage all team members to keep an eye out for these opportunities, and we help accommodate them through scholarships, paid time off, and mentorship.
Michael Green, Winona
6. Support Employees in Creating Their Own Side Projects
One of the best ways I’ve found to keep my staff on top of industry trends … is to encourage and support them in creating their own side project websites. This not only benefits them from a financial perspective (particularly with successful affiliate websites), but ultimately it means that they have to stay on top of emerging trends and changing digital landscapes … and have both a personal and professional incentive to do so.
James Taylor, James Taylor SEO Consultancy
7. Use LinkedIn Learning
LinkedIn Learning is extremely beneficial for any organization. Managers can determine what classes are the best for their department and schedule learning sessions together to create a collaborative team environment. These sessions can be performed monthly to ensure employees are up-to-date on trends. Whether a team is remote or in person, this solution works for everyone.
Jodi Neuhauser, Ovaterra
8. Create a Reading List for the Team
To stay up-to-date with dynamic changes in the marketing industry, our team has created a reading list with the newest articles from our field. We regularly check what’s posted on the most influential marketing blogs and look at our LinkedIn newsfeed for any relevant updates. Our focus is primarily on SEO topics; however, we are also interested in things like digital PR, augmented reality, or the Metaverse.
Later, we share the list with each other and discuss if we find it suitable for our current projects. Such an approach allows us to improve our knowledge and stay current with anything that is going on in the industry. Reading different marketing content helps us to evaluate which skills we need to acquire as a team to stay competitive in the market. We can then decide which courses are the most suitable for us and invest our energy in becoming better marketers.
Dorota Lysienia, MyPerfectResume
9. Attend Conferences and Network with Others
We provided opportunities for our staff members to represent our company and attend conferences and seminars, both in person and online. Through these events, they are able to learn from leaders in their field and network with other professionals. As a result, they acquired the knowledge and skills needed to stay ahead of the curve in their industry.
Accordingly, as we continue to invest in our employees’ professional development, we ensure they have access to the latest technology and software in the workplace. Doing so enabled us to show our commitment to their growth and success. This, in turn, enhances loyalty and engagement among our employees, allowing us to remain competitive and successful.
Kevin Joubin, Branded Surveys
10. Implement On-the-job Training
We have two avenues that we use to make learning new job skills as efficient and painless for employees as possible. We’ve found success in implementing on-the-job training programs, which allow employees to continue working while picking up new skills they’ll need.
This method has been effective for our company needs and integrates seamlessly into our daily work environment. In addition, company-sanctioned online training courses play a big part in allowing employees to work while [helping] them learn new skills. Between these two elements, we’ve created a clear path for continued learning for our employees.
Alex Chavarry, Cool Links
There are hundreds of ways to keep your employees current with your industry, but here at Stukent, we believe nothing is more powerful than hands-on experience. That’s why we offer more than 20 different simulations to help you upskill, reskill, and upgrade your teams.
To learn more about Stukent’s simulations and training solutions, visit our L&D website.
