“My best skill was that I was coachable. I was a sponge and aggressive to learn.”
– Michael Jordan
When it comes to employees, it is not always about gathering information but also developing your skills. There is a huge difference between knowledge and skills, but not many people have acquired the difference.
Difference between knowledge and skills
The major difference between knowledge and skills is taking action. Many training courses will provide you with the appropriate knowledge, but not every course will tell you how to implement the knowledge. Your course goal also determines what skills your audience is acquiring and how you’re helping them implement the knowledge.
Make sure you are filling in the gap between knowledge and action!
Which one is more important?
Knowledge and skills: If we see it, which one is more important? Knowledge is the theoretical understanding of information. Whereas skills are practical and help people implement knowledge into actions.
But we can’t say leave one and run behind the other. For being successful, both are equally important.
Why you should utilize both?
Knowledge and skills both are important for upskilling employees. When you treat training as just sharing some knowledge with your employees, it is a possibility that you will lack your company goals.
Your ideal training should start with determining a goal for your institution. After you have decided on your goal, you should give knowledge to your employees in a way that they know how to utilize it to develop new skills.
If you want your KPIs to improve, you should see that your employees should move from knowing to doing.
How can you promote your employees from knowing to doing?
Employees are of course responsible for improving their knowledge and skills but you can make the task easier for them. You can also take the help of the previous goals that you have kept for your company to determine how your learning strategy has worked for you.
So, how can you turn words into action with your training programs? Let us see:
1. Give it its sweet time
The first thing to know is that changing habits takes time. If you are telling your employee to take time out of their busy schedule and do something that they are not used to doing, it is going to take time.
Prioritize upskilling people, and give them their own time to acquire those skills. You must introduce the new skills gradually and give employees time to adapt. For instance, now everything is getting quite high-tech, and the older generations often face difficulty keeping up with the new methods. Hence, you cannot expect them to learn at the same pace as others.
2. Introduce the new skills with practicality
If you want to introduce new skills to the learners, you must introduce the skills with practicality. But what does it mean? It means showing the learners how to use particular skills. For instance, if you want to teach your learners about customer service. You can help them by diving deep into resolving the customer’s issues. You can do this using the following methods:
- You can create video scenarios like real life so people will know how to deal with the situation.
- You can give them a script or sample to understand how they can interact with the audience.
3. Practice sessions
Give them real-life scenarios that will help them understand how they can cope with different situations. You can do it with the help of quizzes, which will help them make the right choice. Also, you can analyze these reports and help them improve their customer interactions.
4. Change your teaching approach
If you are teaching your employees constantly about what are the things they have to do and why they are important, you are lacking the core of good training. Knowledge and skills should go hand in hand.
As a result, make certain that you also teach your employees how to perform the tasks. You must teach them the ways they can upskill and utilize the information practically.
5. Teach in small bits
We all know an employee schedule is quite busy so adding training to it will feel like another task. So, to remove the burden from your employees you can present the knowledge in small pieces. What does that even mean?
Rather than taking hours of long sessions, you can distribute into tiny chunks of content like 20 minutes sessions. These small sessions will help your employees learn better and grasp the knowledge more efficiently.
6. Follow up
If you want your employees to upskill, you have to follow up and ask them how they are benefitting from the course. You must understand their requirements and also how they are coping with the changes. Send periodic emails regarding how the training is benefitting them and if they want any other classes for the same.
You can ask them for suggestions for which topics they want to be educated on. You can ask this in the team meetings as well and organize sessions that have the greatest number of listeners.
How can you make it easy?
We now assume that you have understood the difference between knowledge and skills. Also, how you can shift your approach from “theoretical knowledge to ‘practical doing’.
If you are confused about, how can you give effective training that will help the employees retain knowledge? You can deploy LMS for the task. A learning management system will help you to deliver better training to the employees.
How LMS will help you deliver training better?
- Gamification to train the employees better
- Advance course builder to prepare easy and effective courses
- Certificates to build healthy competition among the employees.
- You can access knowledge retention with the help of quiz results.
- You can get a brief report on how your courses are working for your employees.
- You can have discussions through the community feature.
- Drip emails will help you to schedule courses and also send reminders to your employees upon the courses.
Knowledge is not enough if it is not converted into skills. Hence, make sure you promote your employees to ‘do more rather than ‘understand more.
