Using staff development to maintain excellence 

Staff development can help your staff keep up-to-date with best practice and maintain excellence in your practice 

To ensure your staff remain to up-to-date with best practice, regular learning and development opportunities should be offered. The benefits of investing in these opportunities include:

• The delivery of good or outstanding care.
• Improved workforce competence and productivity.
• The opportunity to develop future leaders.
• Improved recruitment and retention rates.

Here are some ways you can establish learning and development opportunities for your staff.

Build a learning plan – a detailed learning plan makes sure your budget and resources are being used effectively to provide opportunities for your staff to empower them to develop their skills.

To build a learning plan, you should follow these four steps:

• Carry out a strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results (SOAR) analysis and skills gap analysis: a SOAR analysis focuses on your practice’s current strengths and vision for the future while a skills gap analysis identifies where your practice needs to improve. 
• Develop individual learning plans: you can identify individual learning needs through staff one-to-one meetings, which will inform your learning plan.
• Budget for your learning plan: make sure you have the appropriate funds to deliver the training your practice needs.

Refresh learning – refreshing learning is essential for maintaining excellence in your practice. There are different reasons why a worker needs to refresh their learning, including: 

• New legislation or new best practice: to stay up-to-date with current legislation and best practice, staff should refresh or update their training. 
• New risks: new risks – such as new equipment, a change to the environment, policy, procedure, someone accessing care developing additional support needs or a new client with different needs – will require staff to go back to their training to ensure they are still using the best practice for the new situation. 
• Timeframes: depending on mandatory training requirements some refresher training is required (or recommended) at specific time intervals. 
• Staff competency: staff should be monitored as they work to ensure they continue to demonstrate the skills required for their roles.

Opportunities for staff development 

To maintain excellence, you can encourage your staff to learn and develop in the following ways:

• On the job learning.
• Apprenticeships.
• Qualifications.
• Webinars and conferences.