It's Time To Rethink Your Soft Skills Training Strategy

Steps that will help to ensure you’re prepared for what lies ahead

It’s time to think about soft skill training in a new way. We all know this type of training traditionally takes place face-to-face over the course of a day or two and includes role play, personalized coaching, and more advanced programs that offer individualized video recording. 

It’s a big event. While there’s no replacement for that type of collaboration, comradery and personalized coaching, many organizations no longer allow their professionals to be away from work for extended amounts of time. The result? Soft skill training is falling by the wayside and many of you are not doing it at all. 
 
It's time to rethink your soft skills training strategy. The following steps will help ensure you’re prepared for what lies ahead. 

Collaboration with IT is a critical component of your training initiatives. In the past, training and development departments never had to work with IT to get training initiatives off the ground. Because of this, those relationships may not exist, creating a disconnect that can be difficult to overcome. I strongly recommend that you identify someone on your team who has IT experience or baseline IT knowledge who can serve as the liaison with the IT department. 

This is a critical first step in implementing the AI-driven software and gamification options available to you. If you can’t get IT involved and on board with the adoption of these newly available technologies, you will not be able to grow your professionals in a scalable, measurable and budget-friendly way. 

While a blended learning approach to training is nothing new, it can be challenging to apply to soft skills training. Take a fresh look at your content and consider how you can spread the learning out over several weeks or months. Ultimately, there’s no way around it. You must redesign your curriculum and adapt it using available technologies. For example, week one might feature a 60-minute educational webinar with an assignment on AI-driven software or an eLearning platform designed for practice. 

Week two could include a virtual collaboration session with several team members and a manager for role-play scenarios. Week three may be a face-to-face team meeting to practice the new skills and have a discussion. Thirty days from then, you repeat the process with new role plays and new circumstances. 

When you’re first getting started, you don’t know what you don’t know. This means, you likely can’t do it all by yourself. You’ll have to identify and interview outside vendors who you can lean on to answer your questions. These partners can provide you with a variety of solutions to help you reach your goals. This may include training tools that can be implemented via mobile devices, an existing eLearning platform, live online or even face-to-face. 

When soft skills training becomes somewhat automated, the customization that naturally occurs in a classroom can be lost. This may decrease the effectiveness of the training because the end users may feel that it doesn’t apply to them. You must be willing to create different activities and assignments to meet the specific needs of different levels of professionals within your organization. 

Once all your systems are in place and the training is off the ground, your work still isn’t done. In order to keep individuals engaged, accountable and ultimately implementing the news skills they’ve learned, consider enlisting the help of their managers. Assigning these managers tasks and/or meetings with the trainees is a critical step to ensure your great training content isn’t forgotten in the hustle and bustle of daily tasks.    

Ultimately, adopting and implementing these new technologies provides you the opportunity to successfully train more people within the flow of work for less money than ever before.