There’s a reason SHRM shared that professional development opportunities are the top way to retain employees. Creating opportunities for your workers to enhance their skills gives them a reason to engage in their work fully: you care about their advancement and education.
That being said, not every opportunity is valuable for every employee. Development is most effective when it's tailored to the individual involved and contributes to their specific success.
Use the lens of DISC to provide high-quality, specialized job training that benefits the individual, to then benefit teams and the entire organization. Here are professional development ideas for each behavioral style that you need to know.
Direct communicators are ambitious, forceful, decisive, strong-willed, independent, and goal-oriented. They prefer to get to the point and make quick decisions for quick outcomes.
For a Direct worker, it’s all about long-term skill development. Promoting a futuristic point of view and skillset will help them become more resilient in the workplace.
Consider emotional intelligence training for your Direct workers to build empathy, deeper listening, and stronger relational awareness. This way, Direct communicators can balance their natural drive for results with meaningful connection, creating a more influential, effective, and well-rounded approach.
Another excellent opportunity for Direct workers is to put them in a mentorship program. Reward their natural inclination towards leadership and encourage them to shift their focus from handling everything personally to allowing others to grow and take ownership.
Reflective communicators are cooperative, low-key, modest, and mild. They tend to engage people by being agreeable and outcome-focused, and prefer clear, precise, and thorough communication.
While Reflective workers are excellent teammates and collaborators, they can struggle to voice their opinions and needs. They might not speak up, even when they have a better understanding or approach, so Reflective workers will gain the most value from professional development that builds their confidence.
Offer up negotiation training for your Reflective communicators! By giving them useful tools and practice advocating their ideas and navigating conflict more effectively, Reflective individuals are empowered to engage with greater clarity, confidence, and influence.
Outgoing communicators are people-oriented, optimistic, and enthusiastic. They are creative problem-solvers, skilled at negotiating conflict, and tend to have warm, friendly demeanors.
For Outgoing individuals, active listening workshops and precision communication training help balance their natural enthusiasm. By practicing their listening skills, they’ll be able to respond with clarity, structure, and reliable follow-through. “Practicing the pause” can help them learn to let others lead instead of overwhelming them with high energy.
In addition, focusing on time and priority management skills will be especially useful for Outgoing communicators. Under pressure, people with a high Influence score can be disorganized and easily distractible. By teaching them how to create systems to stay focused and consistent with commitments, your Outgoing workers will be able to harness their energy and focus it with precision for efficiency and effectiveness.
Reserved communicators are restrained, controlled, and reflective. They prefer to be socially discreet and can struggle to engage with styles very different from their own behavioral style.
Reserved workers will benefit from focusing on improving their presentation skills. Talking in front of others is not something that Reserved people tend to seek out, but by providing structured training, they can gain confidence in their public speaking abilities and become more accustomed to it. Even using professional development as an opportunity to practice small talk and rapport building will benefit Reserved communications.
Team engagement activities are another way to help Reserved workers advance professionally. Build confidence in collaboration, asking for feedback and help, and sharing their ideas in group settings. Doing this more formally as an official part of workplace training will help your Reserved communicators get used to engaging with the team, and will give them a process to follow in the future, which will help provide comfort in social situations
Steady communicators are considerate, compassionate, and accepting of others, but might seem indifferent or hesitant on the surface. They prefer a slow pace, defined responsibilities, and clearly outlined expectations.
Steady workers will benefit from professional development that helps them increase their agility and adaptability. This can occur through scenario-based sprints, where they are forced to prioritize and make decisions on the fly. You can present teams with a 5-minute scenario like: “Your project deadline just shifted up by a week—what’s your new plan?” Encourage them to quickly identify top priorities, drop non-essentials, and define next steps. This helps Steady communicators practice rapid prioritization and confidence under uncertainty in a low-stakes environment, giving them the skills to do so when they’ll need them.
Steady communicators will also benefit from learning self-advocacy and boundary-setting. Steady teammates tend to prioritize the needs and desires of others above themselves, sometimes to their detriment—give them opportunities to practice saying no and pushing back when necessary.
Dynamic people are open, confident, and lively. They prefer high-energy, quick conversations and can come across as impatient or agitated under stress. They prefer open environments, discussing ideas, and fast-paced work.
Dynamic workers will benefit from stress management and emotional regulation training. They prefer to move so quickly that they can miss their own emotional cues to slow down and figure out what they’re feeling. Practices such as mindfulness techniques, box breathing exercises, and emotional labelling will help them stay grounded under pressure and reduce urgency-driven reactions.
Dynamic communicators will also benefit from professional development that helps them embrace structure in a way that still feels authentic to their preferred behavioral style. Teach them how to conduct daily or weekly alignment rituals within their teams. These short, structured check-ins reinforce consistency and follow-through while still moving quickly. This builds accountability, coordination, and dependable communication habits.
Precise communicators are dependent, neat, careful, and compliant. They want to get the job done right and thrive on establishing workplace routines and processes.
Precise workers will benefit most from building flexibility and big-picture thinking. Have them engage in cross-functional shadowing, where they spend a half day shadowing another department to see how decisions ripple across the organization. This exposure will help increase strategic awareness and help them reflect on the efficiency of their own workflows and priorities.
Precise communicators will also benefit from problem reframing training. Instead of jumping into solutions, your team will learn to expand the problem itself. Do this by asking questions like:
By exploring outside of the pre-set parameters of a problem, Precise workers can put their excellent analytic skills towards uncovering hidden strategies, all while increasing agility and futuristic thinking.
Pioneering communicators are independent, unconventional, and outspoken. They like finding the best outcome with the best possible means, no matter how random or experimental. They prefer an uninhibited work environment and work best under leaders who trust in their ability to complete tasks their own way.
Pioneering workers will benefit from professional development that pushes them to up their discipline. Providing training for them to learn and use SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for more consistent, high-quality work. Have them practice using the SOPs in a mock scenario to get into the habit of following them, and use that as an opportunity to identify holes in the process.
Encourage Pioneering communicators to create peer review processes and cross-check rounds. Pioneering people enjoy collaboration and dreaming together, so tying development to connection and brainstorming will motivate them to engage more deeply. Peer review processes will also help Pioneering people slow down and quality-check their work according to the process created by collaborators, rather than barreling forward with no parameters.
When organizations commit to personalized, professional development, they don’t just strengthen skills; they strengthen trust, engagement, and loyalty. By viewing growth through the lens of DISC, you’re better equipped to support each individual in the way they learn, communicate, and contribute best.
Want to harness the power of DISC for your team or organization? We want to help.