How to Conduct Online Soft Skills Training for Employees
Soft skills are a critical part of what makes a strong employee in any organization. These abilities to interact have an impact on how our employees communicate with colleagues, problem-solve, manage their time during work hours, and contribute to the long-term success of your organization. When you hire a new employee, you know they have the technical skills to succeed in their position. But research by the Stanford Research Institute International and Carnegie Mellon Foundation found that 75% of long-term job success depends on soft skills, while only 25% depends on technical skills.
What are soft skills in the workplace?
Fortunately, soft skills can be trained. The development of an employee’s emotional intelligence—the ability to learn and apply skills like empathy, organization, and leadership—is nearly limitless, and it’s essential for success in every field of business. Echo360’s EchoPoll learning management platform can help your organization train your employees in the following soft skills:
- Communication
- Teamwork
- Problem-solving
- Time management
- Attitude
- Work ethic
- Adaptability
- Self-confidence
- Ability to learn
- Networking
- Active listening
- Critical thinking
- Organization
- Punctuality
- Leadership
What are the best types of soft skills training programs?
The first two steps happen before the training even begins. First, hire smarter. When conducting interviews, include people in the process who can assess soft skills. If two candidates for a position have similarly impressive resumes, choose the one with the stronger soft skills. Of course, you can’t analyze all soft skills through an interview process, but you’d be surprised what an accurate picture you can get of somebody’s soft skills if you have someone dedicated to paying close attention to their self-confidence, problem-solving abilities, willingness to learn, and more.
The next step is to do a company-wide training needs assessment. This can be done through EchoPoll’s assessment capability. Once each person has their own dashboard, assign the assessment. The results can be calculated in whatever way will be most meaningful to the development of your training program. It may be most effective for the entire company to focus on certain sets of skills at once, or it might be more effective to separate employees into groups who work on the skills those employees most need or want to develop.
Finally, your organization’s content creators can use EchoPoll to develop dynamic online soft skills training that follows Echo360’s e³ philosophy.
That means it’s equitable—all employees going through a particular training course can access it equally. Since EchoPoll meets or exceeds WCAG 2.0 standards, you can be assured that each employee will have an equitable learning experience on the platform.
That means that instructors are able to assess each trainee’s progress using evidence—they will know when, how, and how much each employee engages with the content and how well they perform. They will receive both overall performance reports and very specific reports so they can catch any problems before they get too big to handle.
That means the content is engaging—after all, if the employees are bored during training, they aren’t likely to learn very much. Content creators have a powerful tool in their hands and can make dynamic multimedia presentations with embedded quiz questions and polls to keep the trainees’ interest. They can also use EchoPoll’s gamification features, like completion badges and a leaderboard, to promote friendly competition between coworkers who are completing the same training.
There are many more EchoPoll features you can use to enhance your employees’ soft skills training. We’d love to have you take a look and learn more about EchoPoll’s features and how it can help you implement the best soft skills training program for your employees.