Part of the reason I love training and development is because I get to help people do their jobs better, and that makes them and their companies happy. And we see the results of our efforts through celebrations for teams and individuals exceeding sales quotas and customer service goals. These recognitions are important. They recognize focused, sustained effort, and inspire others to continuously seek improvement.

And now Talent Development (TD) colleagues, it’s our turn to tout our work and the great cooperative and complementary efforts of others in our organizations that help our individual performers and teams achieve their goals. We know that the competition our organizations face is fierce, and that our employees face ever-changing markets and expectations. We also know our teams need to continuously develop more advanced and flexible skills to succeed, and we’re poised to help them. Let’s show them how.

December 5─9, 2016 is ATD Employee Learning Week (ELW). This is an opportunity for organizations to highlight the important connection between learning and achieving organizational results. And who better to do this than the TD professionals themselves?

If you haven’t heard of ELW, take a look at the ATD Employee Learning Week page on the ATD website. In the meantime, think about how you could celebrate the efforts of your TD team and recognize learning and development achievements of individuals. Here are a few ideas.

Promote Your TD Team

Summarize your TD projects and their results and share it with your entire organization via email, website, and internal newsletters and blogs.
Promote upcoming initiatives.
Ask your CEO or other leader to draft an email proclaiming an internal recognition of ELW that recognizes the real results of training.

Recognize Individuals

Publically recognize individuals from TD and other departments who had a significant influence on someone’s performance through training and development activities (e.g., mentoring or actively supporting a new training initiative or on-the-job application of new knowledge and skills).
Publicize individuals throughout the organization who earned degrees or certificates in the past year.

Encourage individuals to seek ongoing learning and development

Promote upcoming internal events and explain how they can affect one’s performance.
Remind employees of available education and development opportunities (e.g., scholarships or tuition reimbursement opportunities).
Encourage employee-led “lunch and learn” events.

Please share what ELW efforts you have made and how they affected the learning culture in your organization, or what you have planned for 2016.

And by the way, thank you to TD colleagues throughout the world who generously post and share their ideas throughout the year. Thanks, too, to my Gillespie Associates colleagues who inspire me daily with their creativity and dedication to creating great learning experiences that enable individual and organizational achievement.