Your managers need to learn new skills – fast

Very different skills are now being demanded from managers at an accelerated pace – especially if they want to stay one step ahead of the game. Managing a team remotely is now the norm as opposed to the exception – when Covid 19 hit there was no time for cold feet, managers were forced to embrace working from home and to learn to trust the new freedom and responsibility of their employees. Now that the working environment has evolved towards more of a hybrid model, managers are once again at a crossroads about how they should fulfil their new role.

In addition, more focus is needed on the human aspect of leadership. Managers need to take care with their staff members. A lot has changed in the world over the past two years – there is still a lot of uncertainty, and more flexibility is required. More people management is needed than ever before, with stress and burnout being very real issues that need to be handled sensitively and appropriately.

Courses around mental health, dealing with the loneliness of working from home, and supporting your remote colleagues, are just some of the topics you’ll find on the SkillsTown platform.

Managers must also learn to respond to a new, primary means of communication – that being digital. While a video call is a handy and accessible means of communication, it’s easy to miss the details and the non-verbal clues that one receives when you’re sitting with someone one-on-one. Sometimes having a five-minute conversation at the coffee machine is all a manager needs, but now chance meetings like this, falls by the wayside. Instead, a Teams meeting needs to be planned and set-up, minimising spontaneity and social interaction in the workplace. We also rarely call each other impulsively, and while a Teams meeting starts briefly with social talk, participants are a lot more aware of time and very quickly get down to the nitty-gritty of the call.

And if management needs to learn about digital leadership, they’d better learn it digitally themselves too.

At SkillsTown we believe that learning can and should be done differently. Learning and development is sometimes still seen as a goal, but it’s simply a means to be able to do something better. Learning can also quite expensive. If you promote lifelong learning in your organisation, you need to enable as many people as possible to learn at any given time, in a number of different ways. SkillsTown is a cost-effective solution to all of these, offering practical, affordable and accessible training for managers.

And it’s not about the title for us either, we’re here to help people perform better. We believe in a modern form of training that uses the Open Badge system of accreditation. It’s the world’s leading format for digital badges, verifiable and portable and packed with information about skills and achievements. They’re an innovative way to recognise learning – sitting alongside traditional qualifications and professional accreditations, and continuously providing the tools you need to develop.