Training is arguably one of the most important aspects of your business operations. Of course, decision making, client contact, operations—all of these are integral components of daily business.
However, every person involved in those components has been influenced by the training they receive as part of your company culture. From onboarding of new employees to compliance training to ongoing trainings, training should be receiving careful attention.
While the management team should have a clear vision of the outcomes expected when it comes to training, the best place to start is with your employees. Frontline employees often know what they need (and want) related to learning and professional development, and they can help you know how best to approach it. As you work to develop your curriculum and map out your initiatives, don’t leave frontline staff as an untapped resource!
As you get started identifying training needs and your goals/outcomes, consider the following:
Highlight the benefit of each session. A training should never be something employees attend simply to check off an item on a to-do list. Employees should see trainings as a necessary and beneficial part of the job, and those benefits should be clear to all involved. Let participants know up front the anticipated outcomes and how they will use what they learn.
Choose trainers wisely. If you want the buy-in of your employees, make sure the person presenting is knowledgeable and engaging. Keep in mind that team supervisors or top-performing employees may know how to do something, but that does not mean they know how to train someone else to do it well.
Tie learning benefits to overall goals. Trainings should support your organization’s operating priorities. Whatever management’s goals are, whether they are related to performance, productivity or quality assurance, the relevance of the training to reaching those goals should be clear.
Onboarding training should be outstanding. The success of your organization’s training program begins with the onboarding process. When new employees are trained, you should be setting up expectations for future learning opportunities. Onboarding should not only train employees in the job they will be doing but also in organizational values and company culture. Make them well organized, well executed, up-to-date, thoughtful and engaging.
Keep them looking forward to it. Make training an integral part of your company’s culture and take it from a have-to-do to a want-to-do:
- Congratulate members for reaching progress goals and publicly acknowledge accomplishments.
- Encourage employees to increase their engagement
- Discuss the importance of their involvement
- Make sure training is a valuable use of employees’ time
- Be creative and innovative in developing trainings
Could your organization use some guidance to craft management’s expertise into creative and engaging trainings? Are you using technology to deliver trainings that are convenient and valuable? Could you use some help designing your materials? It’s time to consider eLearning. A Learning Management System (LMS) can help you streamline all of your trainings.
With an LMS, you can design trainings for various teams or specific needs. You can provide a flexible training schedule to employee a large number of employees and schedules all while easily keeping up with completion and results. If your management team doesn’t have the bandwidth to create your course load, outsource your needs to the professionals at The Learning Network who are experts in the field and happy to help create the platform you desire. Whatever your product need, we can satisfy any inquiry to make the world of eLearning simple, straight-forward and successful.
