Unlocking Potential: How Training and Mentorship Drive Professional Growth

In this episode of the Xcast, Ciara Nowak, the Training and Development Manager at InVision, takes us through the significance of employee growth via training and development. Ciara covers trending topics in the training space and shares best practices for fostering a learning culture within organizations. Later, she is joined by Elisha Kessman, Vice President of Experience Delivery, who leads InVision's mentorship program. Elisha highlights the vital role mentorship plays in personal and professional development, sharing tips on how employees can benefit from mentor-mentee relationships across different disciplines.

Key Takeaways:

1. Importance of Training and Development: Investing in training and development is crucial for both personal growth and organizational success. It not only helps employees stay updated with industry trends but also enhances productivity, processes, and engagement within the organization.
2. Impact on Employee Retention and Profitability: Organizations that prioritize training and development experience higher employee retention and profitability. Studies show that employees who engage in learning feel a stronger connection and purpose in their work.
3. Designing Effective Training Programs: Effective training programs should be tailored to the audience's needs, considering their learning styles (e.g., interactive, self-paced, or lecture-based), and addressing specific skill gaps. Clear, realistic goals should be set to ensure comprehension and application of the material.
4. Mentorship as a Complement to Training: Mentorship programs are a valuable extension of training, providing personalized guidance and support. Mentors help employees explore growth areas, share experiences, and collaborate across disciplines, enhancing overall development.
5. Creating a Culture of Learning: Organizations should foster a learning culture by leading by example, encouraging employee feedback, and making training accessible. Celebrating learner successes, conducting regular sessions, and offering a blend of live and on-demand learning opportunities can significantly boost engagement.

Transcript

Ciara Nowak:                Welcome to IVC Podcast, the Xcast, where we help brands navigate audience engagement and times of change. My name is Ciara Nowak. I am the training and development manager here at InVision Communications, and at a high level, my role is to design, implement, and evaluate comprehensive training programs [00:00:30] to meet the learning and development needs of our internal employees so they can achieve our vision of being the best audience engagement agency to work with and for.

                                    I'm thrilled to host the Xcast podcast to talk about three items pertaining to training and development. They are what is training and development and trending training hot topics, what training looks like at IVC, and tips to increase learning at your organization. To kick things off, I want to discuss the pressing questions [00:01:00] of why training and development is important and why you should invest in training.

                                    You may be thinking it's just another item to check off your list, right? Well, it's actually way more than that. As human beings, we all have a psychological need to learn and grow. Now more than ever, we need to focus on continuously developing ourselves and our people to stay on top of industry trends, enhance our processes and efficiencies, and continuously reskilling ourselves. [00:01:30] Gallup has a plethora of information on why training and development is important. In their article titled Improve Work Performance with a Focus on Employee Development, they mention organizations that make a strategic investment in employee development report 11% greater profitability and are twice as likely to retain their employees.

                                    The 2024 Workplace Learning Report by LinkedIn mentioned that seven in ten employees say learning improves their sense of connection at their organization, [00:02:00] and eight in ten people say learning adds purpose to their work. These statistics indicate that training and development is necessary for every organization and can reduce employee turnover while increasing organizational connection and growth.

                                    Let's jump into our first topic to discuss what training and development is and trending hot topics. Training and development focuses on designing, implementing, and evaluating training programs to ensure all employees have the skill, knowledge, [00:02:30] resources, and confidence to excel in their roles and achieve business objectives. Designing a program requires identifying the audience's skill gaps, setting realistic goals for explaining the material, tools, and concepts, and ensuring the audience can comprehend the information presented.

                                    Implementing a program, again, depends on the audience, but it also depends on the resources required to properly explain a new skill or concept. Some [00:03:00] questions I like to keep in mind are how does the audience best learn? Do they best learn by doing or watching? Do they need printed materials? Should this be a lecture style course or should this be a self-paced course that is on-demand? Should the course be interactive or does this course need to be in person or can it be held in a virtual environment?

                                    Lastly, evaluating a training program is essential to ensuring your audience, comprehensive materials, and skill [00:03:30] set growth is evident. To evaluate training programs, you can ask attendees to complete a training evaluation or ask for real-time feedback. Some questions you could ask are, "Will you be able to implement presented information into your role, or do you have a better understanding of the concept tool, or do you feel more confident in performing a particular task?" Or you may see visible evidence when interacting with an employee who has participated in a training opportunity.

                                    According [00:04:00] to LinkedIn, there are top five most in demand skills for 2024 are communication, such as communicating effectively and creating connections in person or in virtual environments. Customer service, such as developing relationships and building trust with clients. Leadership, such as organizations and how they are developing their employee base. Project management such as ensuring all roles and responsibilities are clear and projects stay organized. And number [00:04:30] five, management, such as providing feedback and coaching to employees.

                                    Now that we have talked about training and development as a whole in some trending topics, I bet you all are wondering what does training look like at InVision Communications? InVision Communications stands out due to the quality and quantity of training programs we offer. We start providing training on day one for employees. It all starts with onboarding. On day one, we start to familiarize new employees [00:05:00] with who we are as an agency, discuss what makes us stand out, and how jobs are processed. We also expose them all to incredible solutions that help us be the best audience engagement agency to work with and for.

                                    All employees are assigned self-paced courses that they can refer to at any time through our learning management system. Training consists of basic information on how to use tools and resources with specific deadlines that correlate with in-person meetings with [00:05:30] subject matter experts. Employees attend a training program dedicated to identifying how they lead within the organization and learn how they can adapt their work styles to work more productively with others. They also participate in presentation skills training focused on storytelling, physical presence, overcoming nervousness, presentation development, and impromptu speaking, as many of our employees are responsible for telling or brand stories to move audiences toward action.

                                    [00:06:00] Lastly, new employees have department onboarding training to assist them with integrating into their roles. Materials are developed hand-in-hand with department leaders to ensure materials include all necessary content and are up-to-date. In addition to onboarding training, we have several development opportunities available across the organization. InVision Communications have an annual off-site training as well as monthly and sometimes weekly events such as lunch and learn sessions, [00:06:30] office hour sessions, brown bag sessions, and team training sessions dedicated to helping our employees grow.

                                    Our annual all-company training, held at our company off-site, is dedicated to providing a baseline knowledge to all of our employees and act as a starting point for related follow-up sessions throughout the year. Our more frequent training programs are impactful because actual employees host them, people who want to share knowledge, inspire their peers, and help [00:07:00] us win more business. If an employee is not able to attend live, they are able to watch the on-demand recording and review presentation materials on their own time. Over the past six months alone, we have hosted more than 20 training sessions, which is absolutely incredible.

                                    Many of our live sessions highlight department responsibilities including awareness of what teams do and when to involve them to assist with business. Other programs showcase [00:07:30] past events to show solutions capabilities and how to present solutions to clients, highlight new processes to increase productivity, keep employees updated on best practices, management skills and safety, focus on team development in terms of collaboration, psychological safety, active listening, teamwork, goal setting, feedback, communication, impromptu speaking, and so much more.

                                    In addition to more frequent programs, we have our shadowing [00:08:00] program where employees can observe, practice, and ask questions to subject matter experts to grow their skills and increase utilization, and we have a fabulous mentor program designed to partner employees together to bounce ideas off of and be able to ask questions too. I don't want to spoil it too much, as my colleague Elisha will be joining me later to elaborate on this program at the end of our session today.

                                    The last training element I want to highlight, which happens to me by favorite, is our individual development [00:08:30] plans. IVC is dedicated to the growth and development of employees and they have given me the opportunity to curate custom development plans. Creating these plans has allowed me to connect with our employees, AKA my peers, on a personal level to acknowledge what they want to learn about and really what that means is what sparks joy to them, and to be a safe person to talk to about where they feel they could improve upon.

                                    During one-on-one sessions, we identify areas for re-skilling and up- [00:09:00] skilling and discuss feedback received from others or in performance reviews. I then develop personal training plans with IVC-curated content and external resources such as self-paced courses, articles or other third-party materials or courses. It's a great feeling to receive notifications through our learning management system when an employee has completed a self-paced course that was on their development plan and see them use their new skills or enhance skills in real life.

                                    Now that I have talked [00:09:30] about what training at IVC looks like, I want to give you some quick tips on how you can increase learning at your organization. First and foremost, create a culture of learning by leading by example. Set time aside to partake in training and highlight learners, celebrate a success, and practice learned skills. Conduct surveys on what employees are interested in learning about. Questions around employee training interests can be asked through training evaluations and they can be simple as, " [00:10:00] What topics are you interested in learning about?" You can even suggest topics to people to choose from a drop-down list.

                                    Host trainings during sweet spot hours. Our employees at IVC are all over the country, so we choose to host trainings between the hours of 10:00 AM to noon Pacific time so that we are courteous to all time zones. Record your training sessions for on-demand viewing if someone cannot attend live or would like to review the recording again. A best practice is to [00:10:30] send the follow-up materials and the recording as close to the session as possible due to it being top of mind.

                                    Ensure your training invitations are engaging and spark interest. Include a high-level summary and learning takeaways that employees can implement right away after attending. Set training intentions at the beginning of your session. Ask people to use this time to learn and ask questions by giving their undivided attention to the facilitators, by sending out of their chat messaging systems, [00:11:00] emails, and anything else if possible. Create connection between the facilitators or the content with the audience to encourage engagement and utilize systems such as polls, chatter falls, true or false scenarios, breakout rooms, and even questions that you can ask directly through the chat.

                                    Make your trainings welcoming and friendly. Play music, talk to attendees who arrive early, prompt attendees with questions about what they were looking forward to learning [00:11:30] or ask them to respond to relationship-based building questions in the chat. Prepare your facilitators by ensuring that they know what the training roadmap is, test the technology, have their cameras on, and encourage facilitators to be upbeat and excited when they're presenting. People like to learn from people that seem passionate about what they're talking about, and if you have been through a training session where someone seems mundane, it's because they're probably not very passionate about what they're talking about.

                                    [00:12:00] Through your communication channels, send a day of reminder about training. Get people excited and capture a few extra attendees who had meetings moved around at the last minute and now are able to attend due to that meeting being moved.

                                    Lastly, make it easy for employees to find training content. Create a training development page to house all recordings and resources. This can act as that one-stop shop for all your training and development needs. We have covered quite a lot of information [00:12:30] about training, such as what is training and development, trends and training topics, what training looks like at IVC, and some best practices you can implement right away.

                                    Providing development opportunities will increase your organizational connection and help your company grow overall. Now, I'd like to introduce my friend and fellow colleague Elisha Kessman, a vice president in our experience delivery group who oversees our mentor program. Elisha, thanks for being here.

Elisha Kessman:            Thanks for having me, [00:13:00] Ciara.

Ciara Nowak:                Elisha, I have a few questions I would like to ask you about our mentor program and the first question I have for you is why did InVision start a mentor program and why do you think it's an important part of employee growth?

Elisha Kessman:            That's a really good question, Ciara. For 30 years, we've had a buddy program that had always matched up new employees with a buddy to help them get acclimated to InVision as a whole, but now all these decades later, we realized [00:13:30] we needed to take that a step further to help with people's personal professional development and make a mentorship program that was focused on how we can help the employee learn outside of their relationship with their manager, their project teams, and take that to a different level based on their career aspirations.

Ciara Nowak:                Elisha, I absolutely love your response to that question and I'm so glad InVision created this program for our employees. I [00:14:00] do have a little bit of a personal question for you just because you are overseeing our mentor program, but did you have a mentor when you first started in the industry?

Elisha Kessman:            Absolutely. When I first started my career, I was given great advice to find somebody to emulate and try my best to continue to learn from them. Organically, that turned into a mentorship that really taught me the employee I wanted to be, and while [00:14:30] that same person is not someone I work with anymore, since being at InVision for almost two decades, I've had multiple mentors here, both officially and unofficially, to help me continue to grow along my career path.

Ciara Nowak:                I think that's wonderful and I couldn't agree with you more. I myself have a mentor that's outside of the industry, and this is a person I can go to with any questions I have or help me make decisions or give me some best practices or prevent me from making mistakes [00:15:00] that maybe I don't want to make in the future.

Elisha Kessman:            Something you just said, Ciara, rings really true and we're seeing that in our mentorship program here as well, that it doesn't have to be someone in your same discipline, that we can learn from people from all walks of life within our company or without, but specifically, for the InVision Mentorship Program, part of the pairings that I've been working with don't work in the same solution. Some come from production [00:15:30] that are learning from creative or vice versa. The idea is to have a safe place, someone who is an expert in their field to really care and make an investment in your personal growth and future and have a perspective that is different from your day-to-day manager.

                                    What we have found by pairing together people from different disciplines is that it's also encouraging collaboration. So it is something that the manager [00:16:00] is involved with and it's helping the manager allow the employee to continue in their personal growth in that perspective, but the mentor is there to help them in use cases or in personal anecdotes in a way that's going to continue to allow them to elevate what they bring holistically to their job.

Ciara Nowak:                Sometimes we get the question of where do I start? How do I find a mentor? Do you have any [00:16:30] advice on how to find a mentor within a different discipline?

Elisha Kessman:            Absolutely. For our InVision Mentorship Program, we actually created a questionnaire, not only for the mentee but for the mentor as well. It asks a lot of probing questions about strengths, opportunities for growth, interests, also ways of working, so that then when that application comes in, we're able to review it. I review it, and then I go to the employee's manager as well to [00:17:00] discuss different strengths and opportunities for that employee to see what a good matchup would be. Again, that's the specific benefit for the program that we are running is that we are looking at it holistically from a management perspective to make sure that we partner them with someone that they can learn from based on their personal goals.

                                    I think that's the biggest takeaway is trying to identify what you're looking to improve, [00:17:30] where your curiosity is. Like I said before, who you emulate, who you look up to and want to learn from, even if they don't do your exact day-to-day job.

Ciara Nowak:                I appreciate you putting so much thought into the application and the matching process because it is truly a relationship that you are trying to form. I would love to talk to you a little bit about running this mentor program because you and I both have experience [00:18:00] participating but also managing them, and as we are managing the programs, I know I have received a lot of questions about how should I talk to my mentor? What should I ask them? And I would love to hear from you of what would you suggest for mentees to do to prepare for conversations with their mentors?

Elisha Kessman:            We provide each mentor pairing with a guideline of what to start talking about [00:18:30] your first meeting, not only about goals around what you want to get out of the mentorship program, but also bandwidth, cadence, setting up an expectation of how the two are going to communicate, and it also gives them a place to track everything so that they can continue to put ideas into their next agenda before they have a chance to meet.

                                    We also encourage aligning on ways of communicating so that there's a way to stay in constant contact even outside of [00:19:00] the meetings, but open communication. That's what it always comes down to is being vulnerable and talking about really what you want to learn and get out of having a mentor assigned to you.

Ciara Nowak:                I think it's incredibly beneficial that you have an outline of how a mentor-mentee should be connecting, topics they should be talking about. I think a lot of our programs that are out there, they tend to miss that mark and [00:19:30] it ends up making it more of just a friendship versus an actual mentorship relationship where it's really about business and making sure you're growing within the industry.

                                    I would like to ask you one more question. How do you see mentorship connecting with training and development?

Elisha Kessman:            I feel like mentorship is one piece of a training element, and while there's a formal program, it isn't necessarily about training on the [00:20:00] tactics of how to get a new skill learned. While that mentorship program brings them together, they can talk through things. They can have hands-on learning. We also actually get together with everyone in the program once or twice a year to share best practices, things they've learned from each other, so that it might spark some ingenuity in the conversations you are having, but from there, what I would hope the mentee would get out of it is [00:20:30] an idea around what trainings they could take from you, from our different portals and opportunities because they've identified an area where they could focus more on a specific skill.

Ciara Nowak:                I appreciate you mentioning the training aspect of it and having a conversation about what they want to learn and pointing them in the right direction of where they can receive those resources. Sometimes the language we use isn't heard by someone we are [00:21:00] constantly connecting with, such as maybe your manager or a peer, but when it comes from someone else and they say, "Have you taken this training course before? Have you thought about going to this professional development lecture?" It really comes across that they're trying to help you and uplift you, and that's what's really important to continuing a professional relationship.

Elisha Kessman:            Agreed.

Ciara Nowak:                Elisha, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about mentorship and what [00:21:30] the InVision Communications Mentor Program looks like. Your insight is invaluable and I hope that many of our listeners are able to implement many of the things that we talked about today to enhance their mentor programs themselves.

Elisha Kessman:            Thank you for having me.

Ciara Nowak:                What I want you all to walk away with is that, as human beings, we all have a psychological need to learn and grow. Providing development opportunities will increase organizational connection and help all of our companies grow together. Thank you all so much [00:22:00] for listening and be sure to join us for our next podcast episode coming soon.