When I was hired as vice president of marketing for a growing startup, I knew I had a lot more to learn about search engine optimization (SEO). As is the case with most professions, a staggering number of different specialties fall under the umbrella of marketing, and just because you work in the field doesn’t mean you’re knowledgeable in every discipline. Luckily for me, the company I joined values continued learning, and I was able to receive one-on-one instruction and enroll in online courses to develop my SEO expertise.
当我被一家正在发展的新兴公司聘用为市场部副主管的时候,我就知道我需要学习的不仅仅是搜索引擎优化(SEO)的知识。正如很多专业人士,市场部担负着数量惊人的不同专长的发展任务,并且不能因为你在这个领域里工作,就代表你了解每一个行业的规则了。我很幸运,我就职的公司很重视继续教育,我也能够接受一对一的培训和参与在线课程,培养SEO方面的专业知识。

The experience reinforced several things for me: the importance of supporting employees in continuing their education, that a long career means we never truly stop learning, and that it’s important to seek help when you need it. Moreover, the business benefits of continuing education are powerful. Companies that offer tuition assistance or other education benefits often have much lower turnover rates, and employees typically apply their new skills to the workplace.
这个经历加深了我几个认识:支持员工继续接受教育的重要性,漫长的职业生涯意味着我们不会真正停止学习,还有在自己有需要的时候去寻求帮助。再者,受益于继续教育的公司是强大的。为员工提供助学金或其他教育福利的公司通常员工离职率更低,而员工通常也会把他们的新技能运用于职场当中。

My company, Varsity Tutors, works through a number of channels to create a supportive environment where team members never stop learning. Here are three ways you can help your own employees keep learning:
我所在的公司,Varsity Tutors,是一家利用多途径创造支持团队成员继续学习的环境的公司。下面为大家介绍三个方法,帮助你鼓励你的员工保持继续学习的热诚:

1. Streamline your team’s access to expertise.
1. 安排团队学习专业知识。

As the emergence of learning formats like massive open online courses (MOOCs) and stackable credentials suggest, people prefer easy access education on their schedule. This includes employees, who are consistently balancing demands at work and at home. As a result, one of the best ways to keep your team learning is to ensure their access to expertise is simple and straightforward.
正如大型开放式网络课程(“慕课”)的兴起以及大量有效的证据证明,人们更喜欢日程安排中简便可得的课程。这包含了那些常常需要平衡工作与家庭的员工。结果表明,保持团队继续学习的其中一个最佳方法,就是保证他们接受的专业知识的途径是简单而直接的。

As an example, one of the things that I’m most proud of at our company is that we provide 52 hours of free tutoring to everyone who joins our team -- roughly an hour each week throughout the year. Employees can share these hours with their families, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the amount of this benefit that our staff members use on themselves -- not just to learn new skills that can be applied to their jobs, but to pursue personal passions like writing fiction, speaking a foreign language, or drumming (that last one’s me). Learning can and should be about much more than adding another bullet point to your CV, but almost no one will take advantage if the process is overly complicated or unclear.
举一个例子,我对我所在的公司最感到骄傲的其中一件事情就是,我们为每一个加入我们团队的成员提供了52个小说免费接受培训——一年下来大约每周一个小时。员工们可以和家人一个共度这些学习时间,不过我们都很惊喜地发现员工们本人使用这些时间所获得的好处——不仅仅是学习到工作中所需的新技能,还能追求个人理想,例如写小说,说外语,或者打鼓(最后一个是我的)。学习的意义能够也应该不局限于为个人简历增添亮点,而且几乎没有人会利用到这一点,如果这个过程是过于复杂或者模糊的。

2. Offer specific development opportunities.
2. 提供具体的发展机会。

I strongly believe that many professional development opportunities are too general to be of much help to anyone -- the very nature of a classroom or a corporate retreat means speaking to a group with varying levels of subject knowledge, rather than the individual. People can quickly become uninspired when they’re being taught something they already know and don’t actually need help with. Detailed, team-specific professional development, while more time-intensive, is generally far more effective.
我强烈地相信许多职业发展的机会都太笼统了,难以帮助到任何人——课堂教育或企业倒退的本质之处,在于要对一个包含不同学术知识水平的团体负责,而不是个人。人们在被教授一些早已认识或者他们根本不需要任何帮助的时候,常常很快就会失去积极性。详细的,针对团队的职业发展,虽然需要投入的时间,但是实际上是相当有效的。

Some of our most heavily trafficked pages are ones that highlight the ability to “learn by concept.” These are pages that are optimized to drill you on a conceptual area that you’ve done poorly on during a diagnostic test -- in other words, they’re driven by topic-specific metrics. We use a similar approach for company business. Each week, we hold a business review that exclusively utilizes data to measure performance. It moves us away from the generalities that can be used to guide executive meetings and forces us to confront objective business challenges.
有些我们感到最纠结的简历就是那些突出“概念学习”的能力的。这些简历都是经过优化的,让你往一个诊断试验很低分的概念领域里向下钻——换而言之,这些人受具体话题局限所驱使。对于公司的生意,我们使用了一个相似的方法。每周,我们召开工作检讨会议,单独利用数据来评定绩效。这样让我们从能够用于指导行政会议的笼统转移开来,驱使我们面对客观的商业挑战。

3. Share your growth and supports theirs.
3.分享你的成长并做他人的后盾。

A person must be willing in order to truly learn, and many times, learning in the workplace means first admitting that you don’t know something or would like to improve your performance. People are understandably reluctant to do so in front of colleagues, so it falls to leaders to create an environment that encourages personal growth and the pursuit of knowledge.
为了真正学习到知识,必须是自愿的,并且许多时候,在职场里学习意味着首先要承认你对某些事情是不了解的,或者愿意提高自己的绩效。我们很理解人们不愿意在同事面前这么做,所以这个责任就落在了领导们的肩膀上,去营造一个鼓励个人成长以及追求知识的环境。

One of the best ways to do so is to share your own professional development, as well as to establish that learning is important and natural. Whether this means discussing resources you’ve found with other staff members or setting aside time in team meetings to talk about employees’ latest forays into professional development, you set the tone.
想要做到这件事的其中一个最好的方法就是,分享你个人的职业成长过程,同时也要让对方相信学习是重要的也是自然的。不管这需要你与其他员工讨论你早已找到的资源,还是另外安排团队会议讨论员工最近职业发展的突击结果,形式都由你来决定。

Ultimately, each person learns differently, but all employees can benefit from continuing education. By offering easy access to expertise, tailoring professional development opportunities, and fostering an atmosphere that supports learning, you can begin to lay the groundwork for your team to continue their education throughout their careers.
最后,每一个人都用着不同的方式学习,但是每一个人都能从继续教育当中获得益处。通过提供简便的学习专业知识的突击,量身定制职业发展机会,然后营造一个鼓励学习的氛围,你就可以开始为你的团队成员在个人职业生涯继续学习打下基础。

声明:本双语文章的中文翻译系沪江英语原创内容,转载请注明出处。中文翻译仅代表译者个人观点,仅供参考。如有不妥之处,欢迎指正。