Creative teams play an integral role in communicating a company’s vision to the world. But growing automation, digitalisation, and evolving knowledge are making the creative landscape more challenging for professionals. With how fast-paced the world is today, employees must upskill to remain relevant in their field.
This is because upskilling allows you to create teams that are renewable — not replaceable. Adopting a mindset of continuous learning within the company helps you fully leverage your creative team’s talent, existing knowledge, relationships, and potential to continue evolving together.
Here’s how you can effectively upskill your creative team.
Cultivating an atmosphere of learning
Cultivating an atmosphere of learning within the company helps you fully leverage your creative team’s talent, existing knowledge, relationships, and potential to continue evolving together. Expanding creativity needs to be a proactive effort involving lots of research, innovation, and time. This means you need to encourage your employees to put in this effort. Allow your company to adopt forward-thinking policies and an ethos of development that puts employees at the centre. Listen to your employees’ input and open up opportunities for collaboration and feedback. Allow them to decide what types of skills they want to improve on. Lastly, try and set goals and deliverables for training that can be integrated into your creative outputs. This allows them to reinforce their learning through application.
Opening up broad training opportunities
A good way to expand your employees’ skills is by allowing them to connect and receive insight from other professionals. This can be done by way of conferences, seminars, and classes for online certifications. You can even approach upskilling with a more direct and individualised approach. This can come in the form of mentoring or peer-to-peer training. On the other hand, you can opt to guide your employees by creating personal development plans. This allows you to focus on each employee’s strengths, target specific weaknesses, and guide them towards their specific goals.
Exposure to new technologies
In today’s digital age, a big challenge for creatives is keeping up with innovative technologies that are making the design industry more expansive and exciting. But there’s no reason for your employees to fall behind. Expose your creative team to new technologies — like coding, augmented reality (AR), and UX copywriting — to make their outputs more dynamic. Presenting more creative and technology-oriented outputs to the world helps your company present a forward-thinking and innovative face. Allowing your employees to explore these technologies also gives them greater freedom, confidence, and growth opportunities when it comes to pursuing ambitious projects.
Cultivating soft skills
Even as you are broadening your employees’ hard skills, you cannot neglect the development of soft skills. This is particularly true as 93% of employers place great importance on employees’ soft skills. These include communication, time management, organisation, problem-solving, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills. With the creative industry being highly competitive and time-sensitive, focusing on these aspects can heighten your team’s efficiency and coordination. You can encourage the development of these skills by giving your creative team abundant opportunities for collaboration. Build positive relationships that allow for frequent communication and feedback. By encouraging this type of teamwork, your employees can learn how to function well in a team and be sensitive about time, efficiency, and productivity as a member of a larger group.
At the end of the day, upskilling is about empowering your workers and helping them stay essential in their field. By fostering an environment for continuous growth, you can help them contribute to the company with up-to-date methods.
