No matter your experience level, it’s important to continuously learn and develop new skills. As you advance in your career, you need to work efficiently with colleagues, gain deep expertise within your industry, keep up with emerging technologies and, eventually, manage others.
While you'll naturally develop most of these skills over the course of your career, it's that final point—management—which can be the trickiest to develop. After all, if you're never given the opportunity to oversee others, how can you gauge your effectiveness as a manager?
It’s for this reason that many aspiring or newly appointed managers often wonder whether enrolling in a management training course could be beneficial to their careers.
Here are five of the major benefits management training can help you realize as you work toward your personal and professional goals.
Benefits of Enrolling in a Management Training Course
1. Improved Communication Skills
Clear communication is key to your success, but not every person communicates the same way. Being unable to adapt to and manage multiple communication styles can lead to lower employee engagement and poor team performance.
In management training, you can learn how to communicate in ways that enable you to influence multiple audiences within your organization—from your team members to key decision-makers. Similarly, you can acquire important communication tactics that empower your employees to work toward shared goals.
2. Personalized Feedback and Self-Evaluation
Receiving personalized feedback from your superiors can be one of the most valuable career development opportunities, helping you understand your strengths, weaknesses, and greatest opportunities for growth. Yet, when received on the job, these evaluations can be tainted by the relationships you already have with your colleagues.
A high-quality management training course should include personalized feedback from other professionals who are not biased by a preexisting relationship. Their only concern is helping you improve your abilities as a manager. The course should teach you how to evaluate yourself, practice self-reflection, and evaluate your progress—both in class and in the office, ensuring you keep your skills sharp.
3. Deeper Understanding of the Role of a Manager
A manager’s primary goal is to be an effective implementer—someone who coordinates the actions of others to accomplish organizational goals and objectives. Managers perform a wide array of daily tasks, but their fundamental function is to get things done with and through others.
An aspect of management that is sometimes underestimated is the ability to mentor and guide employees. Although 78 percent of people think having managerial mentors in the workplace is important, only 37 percent of professionals report having one, which means continuing your management education is more important than ever.
A course can help you better understand the ins and outs of a successful manager’s role whether or not you have a mentor in the workplace, enabling you to become a better advisor to others.
4. Improved Understanding of Change Management
Virtually every company is guaranteed to go through organizational transitions over the course of its existence. Whether that change is as small as hiring a new employee or as large as an acquisition, successful leaders need the ability to initiate, adapt to, and manage change.
“Managers must develop skills in designing, directing, and shaping change processes,” said Harvard Business School Professor David Garvin in the online course Management Essentials. “Change is not an event, but a process.”
A managerial course can help you develop the skills needed to oversee a transition by breaking down the components of an organizational change process. It can also equip you with the know-how to tackle questions around how a company can get from point A to point B, what actions employees must take during transitions, and how to ensure those actions are executed.
5. Improved Decision-Making Skills
Managers must be able to make decisions effectively and efficiently. To succeed, you need to learn about the decision-making process—ranging from what aspects constitute a “good” decision, to understanding how social, political, and emotional factors play a key role in the process.
In a course, you can learn how to recognize and avoid key pitfalls that undermine successful decision-making processes. You can also improve both individual and group decision-making and inspire a mindset of inquiry within your organization.
Who Will Benefit from Management Training?
Anyone can benefit from management training, no matter their experience level. Here’s how taking a leadership course can arm you with the expertise needed throughout your career trajectory.
- Aspiring Managers: If you're aspiring to further your career, prepare for the future by learning proper leadership strategies and frameworks and build your skill set.
- Newly Appointed Managers: Whether you’re managing people, products, or projects, a course can help you acquire the skills necessary to succeed from day one.
- Seasoned Managers: As an experienced manager, you can still hone your leadership expertise by applying insights from expert faculty and knowledgeable practitioners trained in managerial processes.
Choosing the Right Training Program
If you’ve decided that enrolling in a management training course makes sense for your personal and career goals, your next step is to choose the program which will best complement your skills and address your weaknesses.
Conduct an honest self-evaluation and determine where you stand to most improve your skills, and then seek a course that will allow you to specifically target that area for improvement. For example, you might want to look for a program focused on change management.
Participating in management training can advance your career by equipping you with the knowledge to make effective decisions, influence change around you, and manage and mentor your colleagues—making you a better employee and manager, and enabling you to overcome any challenges that arise during your tenure.
Do you want to learn how to more effectively manage and lead change at your organization? Explore our eight-week online course Management Essentials, and discover how you can design, direct, and shape organizational processes to your advantage.
