Developing Emotional Intelligence through Online Learning

This is a guest post by Robin Hills. 

Emotional intelligence is an intricate construct that encompasses various aspects of life and business. For example, emotional intelligence includes disciplines such as well-being, resilience, mindfulness, decision-making, and human/interpersonal relationships. These disciplines are crucial for all learning and development, so investing in quality emotional intelligence courses should be a high priority for HR professionals.

Additionally, emotional intelligence continually undergoes qualitative and quantitative research, backed by positive psychology and neuroscience, which supports the implementation of emotional intelligence at all levels and aspects of a business to enhance personal engagement. The question is, how is emotional training best delivered?

Enhancing Online Emotional Intelligence Training with Blended Learning and Coaching

The cost per person of online emotional intelligence training is attractive compared to coaching or traditional training. However, it's important to remember that learners may require additional support to master these skills truly. To develop emotional intelligence skills effectively online, learners can access assessments (such as the EQ-i 2.0) to understand their personality and behaviour better or join live workshops to practice their skills with others.

The best way to support online emotional intelligence training is through a blended approach utilising online or offline personal coaching, ideally supported with a psychometric. Coaching can help people apply what they learn online to their real-life situations. However, coaching involves extra costs.

Delivering Effective Emotional Intelligence Training 

Emotional intelligence is often superficially covered as a bolt-on topic to leadership, management, and other personal development programmes, so it is worth noting that online training requires a different skill set than live workshops. With careful planning, however, delivering emotional intelligence training online can be done effectively, as long as trainers should plan accordingly.

A few stages are involved in learning emotional intelligence through any training intervention:

• Insight – first, the learner identifies areas where their emotional intelligence can be improved.
• Assessment – Reviews are built into courses to highlight areas of emotional intelligence that need attention and where to focus. These assessments increase self-awareness – a core component of emotional intelligence. Simple assessments are helpful, but there are a variety of scientifically valid and reliable evaluations available online that can complement training, although these will increase costs.
• Instruction – online emotional intelligence courses provide in-depth knowledge about the topic.
• Application – learning is only the first part of the journey. To truly practice and improve emotional intelligence, the learner must apply what has been learned in the real world. Practice makes perfect! 

The fact is that without all these components, an online course merely becomes a distracting series of informative presentations. However, when managed appropriately, online emotional intelligence training gives a good return on investment, plus perceivable benefits through improved job retention, reduced stress levels and proven performance results.