How to Develop Your Employees With Hard and Soft Skills Training

Hard skills and soft skills are the two extremely general categories that typically classify the competencies needed to succeed at work. Hard skills—more technical and actionable skills related to a specific task or role—often get greater value in the workplace because they are seen as more essential. Soft skills—defined as interpersonal, communication-driven skills—have, historically, been under-prioritized. But it’s a combination of both hard skills and soft skills that make a person successful in their role.

An effective training program is one that meets all of the needs of learners. In the case of employee development, leaders must look at the whole picture of a team member’s experience to identify places for growth and development. Specifically, training managers and HR departments must identify both hard skills training and soft skills training programs that their team members need to develop.

Why is soft skills training important?

Companies must prioritize soft skills training in order to develop cross-functional, effective teams. Soft skills training can include leadership, communication, administrative, technological, and even organizational skills. These are essential components of everyday work and can improve an employee’s overall productivity and effectiveness at work. Even further, soft skills training can help employees prepare for new roles or to move up the corporate ladder.

Why are hard skills training important?

Hard skills training is essential for organizations because it ensures that team members are equipped to manage technical tasks, understand industry changes, and keep up with compliance. Companies will need to determine which hard skills training courses are relevant for each employee’s unique role and skill set and assign these courses accordingly.

Enable flexible learning.

This is perhaps the most basic (and essential) tenet of any training strategy: make it easy for your team to consume training. If training is difficult, cumbersome, or inaccessible, your team will not train and will miss out on the benefits of it altogether. Learners expect flexibility at work. It is no longer standard that learners will join a meeting for synchronous training or meet up at a singular location for an all-day session. With remote and hybrid teams and a generally more independent workforce, flexibility is essential if you want to encourage engagement.

With a digital LMS platform, learners can engage with training in a format and at a time that makes the most sense for their workflows. In this way, learners can take ownership of the training process and adapt it to suit their needs.

The ExpertusONE LMS platform enables flexible training with:

Whether learners are training from their desks in your office or at home on their mobile devices, a digital LMS platform ensures a consistent experience across all platforms.

Offer courses for hard skills training and soft skills training.

Employees need both technical training and interpersonal training to thrive at work. Companies must offer both and incorporate each type into their standard training programs. Many technical courses will be specific to the company itself and the products and/or services the company offers. There’s a high probability that these courses will be proprietary and developed in-house. With ExpertusONE’s rapid authoring tool, companies can increase learning engagement and improve training experiences for their team members. The tool makes it easy to develop content rapidly with xAPI-compliant microlearning and an intuitive user interface. For those technical, hard-skill courses, interactive elements boost knowledge retention and ensure that training is effective.

On the flip side of the training strategy, courses that cover soft skills (communication, change management, leadership, collaboration, and organization) may benefit most from coaching sessions with a manager or leader. The ExpertusONE Meetings feature enables learners to connect with their managers, practice and discuss skills in real-time, and then later convert those sessions into courses for others to learn from.

Personalize the learning experience.

Each member of your team is uniquely qualified and skilled in their role. Don’t assume that a single training course will be impactful across the board; it may not be. Variety is essential, yes, but so is personalization. Creating personalized learning experiences for your entire team does not mean adding administrative time and increasing the complexity of training delivery. With the ExpertusONE platform, LMS personalization is automated. Using the power of artificial intelligence, learners are provided with tailored training recommendations, updates, and notifications to keep them on track with their unique learning program.

To develop hard and soft skills in their employees, companies must assign training that is relevant to the individual learner. With hard skills, one employee may require technical training about a specific machine, and another employee will never need to use that machine. When it comes to soft skills, training entry-level employees in corporate management skills may be a premature initiative and fall flat, whereas it would be highly beneficial for more established team members who are working their way up the ladder. Our AI-enabled LMS platform understands each learner’s role in the company, the courses their peers are taking, and their interests and applies this information to training recommendations, ensuring that the learner gets access to the courses they actually need and want to take.

Track, manage, and run reports.

To develop your team effectively, you must constantly assess and reassess your employee training strategy. Training data is essential. With it, training managers and company leaders can understand where to continue to invest, where to pull back, and which skills are lacking across the organization. Our LMS reporting tool measures learning data at all times, cataloging it in the learning record store, and making it easy to run a report about learner data in mere seconds.

Training data and training reports help companies provide a balanced training initiative with equally as effective hard and soft skills training programs. Without data insights and constant assessment, companies risk missing the mark with training, leaning too heavily on one set of skills, or minimizing engagement altogether. Developing a well-rounded team requires both technical training and interpersonal training.

Companies can improve business outcomes, increase engagement, bolster retention, and create more effective workplaces by developing both hard skills and soft skills in their employees. Building a balanced training program requires an effective distribution of training types and a variety of courses available to learners. But distribution—how the learners access the courses and engage with training—is equally as important. If learners are not empowered and equipped to train on their own time and in the way that is most effective for their individual role, the training strategy will fall flat.

Providing training for hard skills and soft skills meets the need companies have to build cross-functional teams and the needs that employees have to be developed, challenged, and empowered at work. By investing in hard skills training and soft skills training, companies can add value to the employee experience and provide clear learning pathways that allow team members to advance in their careers. A balanced approach to training that takes into consideration the full picture of an employee’s work experience is the only way to ensure that training is a valuable addition to the work environment.