5 Ways to Incentivize Ongoing Learning With Your Team

Depending on your industry, your employees may need regular continuing education as part of their licensure requirement. Assisting them in this endeavor through ongoing learning opportunities helps them stay current while keeping your organization compliant with applicable regulations.

Furthermore, continuing education extends beyond academia and into soft skills many employers desire but have difficulty teaching. How can you get your staff members onboard and excited about professional development? Here are four ways to incentivize ongoing learning with your team.

1. Establish pay differentials

The best employee incentive is compensation. It’s one thing to tell your staff that you value ongoing learning, and quite another to show it through a meaningful reward.

However, many seem to have forgotten this today, as millions of workers struggle to keep up with soaring inflation amid stagnant wages. Failure to do so has resulted in people no longer believing that hard work pays off in a better life, and that’s a powerful disincentive against professional growth.

Your team is the lifeblood of your enterprise, and more skills for them result in higher profits for you. For example, bilingual employees can help you build client connections in a highly competitive yet multicultural world. Over 75% of customers report they are more likely to spend money on products with information available in their native tongue. Yet, companies continually overlook floor associates with this ability and the value they provide.

Your salary scale should incentivize ongoing learning through pay differentials. The precise structure may vary depending on the nature of your industry, but some examples include:

• Bilingual employees who successfully pass a written or oral exam receive an X% bump in salary.
• Each external professional development activity attempted results in a bonus.
• Additional certifications result in an X% salary increase or bump in hourly pay.

2. Allow for educational alternatives

When establishing your pay differentials, it helps to look at the positive and negative of other systems. For example, many schools implement salary ladders based on higher educational attainment, but going back to college is not the only way to grow career skills. Some employees may resist taking out student loans, and still more might find the high price of higher education not worth the payoff.

However, other personal and professional development avenues nevertheless benefit your business. For example, a volatile employee who works hard at achieving better emotional regulation through therapy and feedback is a treasure, but how do you reward them?

Remember, compensation is always best, but it’s hard to put a price tag on intangibles. Consider this: Let each staff member self-select a goal — and make the reward clear. For example, they get a 5% increase if they attain it. Measure how well they do through anonymous feedback surveys, discussions with immediate supervisors and colleagues and your observations.

You can also make such goals SMART, rewarding employees with smaller compensation bumps along the way. SMART goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Actionable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

For example, you could reward employees with a 1% increase after three months of improvement, with another 1% after the next six months of continued progress. Such structures require team leaders to regularly check in with all team members, increasing communication and improving morale, as employees always know where they stand and what they must do to get to the next level.

Think of it this way: many employers use PIPs, or performance improvement plans, as punitive measures for workers who are already struggling. Flip that narrative on its head by recognizing that everyone has areas on which they can improve (including you), and therefore, everyone is on an ongoing plan where you reward positive behavior instead of focusing on the negative.

3. Provide continuing learning opportunities

Your employees might not know where to start with goal-setting. Provide guidance through access to continuing learning opportunities offered through your business so that your staff doesn’t need to provide outside resources unless they choose.

For example, you could offer a professional development reading list that your staff members can access, demonstrating their completion through journal responses. If you have more resources, you can provide online course content, perhaps partnering with one of the many online learning systems to make classes available to staff. Those with deeper pockets still might offer tuition reimbursement for ongoing professional development.

4. Make your pay structure and incentives clear

You could incentivize ongoing learning through the most well-structured plan imaginable, but employees still won’t participate if they don’t know about it.

Make your plan clear in your onboarding documents and presentations. Periodically remind staff by adding links to your ongoing learning programs in routine employee communications. Encourage employees who have successfully used the provided resources to share their experiences and urge others to take advantage.

5. Incentivize ongoing learning with your team

The world is rapidly changing. How can you incentivize ongoing learning with your team to help them keep up?

Use the above tips to incentivize ongoing learning. By providing meaningful compensation and creating realistic paths to attainment, you show your staff that their hard work pays off and that you recognize the value they bring to your organization.