When looking at the benefits of upskilling for team development, consider this: 80% of employees say upskilling improved their confidence and made them more productive.
While you may recognize that upskilling is essential, how you approach it can vary. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to developing teams, especially when you’re addressing skills gaps across teams of varying sizes.
Here are some of the best employee development courses for small, medium, and large teams.
Development for Small Teams
Understanding exactly what’s happening in your business means having employees with the skills to manage and analyze your data. Analytics skills are ideal for growing on a smaller team, where employees often have more focused roles and responsibilities.
Marketing Analytics allows learners to gain foundational skills to gather, interpret and analyze data related to all things marketing. This skill also helps marketing teams measure the effectiveness of their programs.
Students will practice modeling marketing scenarios and learn how to communicate their findings Excel, Tableau, Google Analytics, and Data Studio.
For those looking for a broader approach to their analytics, Business Analytics courses offer insight into understanding the data across the business. Students learn to analyze data and build models with Excel, query databases using SQL, and create informative data visualizations with Tableau.
Development for Mid-Sized Teams
Depending on the organizational structure of your company, the purpose of your teams can vary widely. Many times, groups such as product management (PM) have mid-sized teams that coordinate across the organization, and PM can benefit greatly from team development.
Having a skilled Product Manager who understands the process from end-to-end is essential. A Product Manager course teaches students how to define product strategy based on market analysis, pitch a product vision to get stakeholder buy-in, and design a user-centered prototype that adheres to engineering constraints.
Learners also have the opportunity to develop timelines and roadmaps that meets stakeholder needs and gets results.
Development for Large Teams
Larger teams are often tasked with major projects focused on executing a specific strategy tied to business KPIs. However, with a larger team it can be challenging to get every on the same page and invested in the “why” behind a project.
Having people on the team who can act as leaders to champion the strategy should be a key consideration for team development.
An Activation and Retention Strategy course teaches students how to guide users through the activation funnel as quickly as possible so they can get right to the “aha” moment with your product or service.
By focusing on the fundamentals of increasing customer engagement, your strategic leads will have what they need to identify and analyze key factors for retention. Improve the lifetime value of your customers and decrease your churn rate.
Monetization Strategy focuses on teaching learners how to build sustainable profit streams from products. For your project champions, skills such as identifying target markets, leveraging buyer psychology, and maximizing outreach channels can make a critical difference in the success or failure of your projects.
Plus, by developing skills for monetization strategies your team will be able to increase the lifetime value of customers.
Create a Strong Foundation for Team Development
Regardless of team size, there are some foundational skills that you can focus on when creating your strategy for upskilling and team development.
While different roles will require upskilling in specific areas, including some additional skills that can help your team work collaboratively and cohesively is to everyone’s benefit — communication, problem-solving, leadership, and more.
Outside of the actual subject matter, ensuring you’re fostering a strong environment for team development so your team is engaged and invested in the learning process is critical. By encouraging employees to expand their skillsets, you’ll be building a workforce that is poised to handle not only what is happening in your enterprise now, but also in the future.
Looking to create a team development strategy that can span across teams of different sizes and meet the needs of your enterprise?
Explore our Teams offering to see how Udacity can help.
