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Online Training

Sheila Keller, Marketing Strategist

Creating a Continued Training & Education Program for Employees

Employee retention is one of the largest headaches we’ve uncovered in businesses, according to many HR professionals we’ve surveyed. According to Glassdoor, “The average U.S. employer spends about $4,000 and 24 days to hire a new worker.” If you are able to successfully retain your employees, the cost (and headache) can dramatically diminish.  Professionally developing your workforce can lead to higher employee retention rates, more productivity in your organization, and 24% higher profit margins. In fact, a whopping 94% of employees would stay with a company if there was an investment in learning.

As businesses become laser focused on developing their employees, the world is quickly turning to remote (and virtual) training memberships. The opportunities are endless with online learning sessions and on-demand nature.  This allows your employees to fit continued education into their busy schedules.

Creating a Continued Training & Education Program for Employees

Create Measurable Goals

Have you ever heard the term “SMART” goals? SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Framed. Ensure your goals for employees has each of these components.  In turn, this will create a higher level of completion and success. When working with your new employees during on-boarding, or when working with existing employees on their development plans, it is important to understand their own professional goals and desired outcome.  This will help to identify their personalized training path. Set up KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to help measure how effectively your employee(s) are working towards goals.

Get Your Leadership On Board

Practice what you preach, as the saying goes, is even more important with development. Showing your employees that even your leaders are taking advantage of virtual training courses will increase confidence with the program. This will also help to get the buy-in from the leadership team as they will be interested to see a return on investment from the training membership you select.

Choose Engaging Content

When assigning classes to your employees, make sure the content is engaging. Nothing is worse than a training program that lacks enthusiasm. Being able to keep the trainee’s attention will be one of the most important factors to measuring the success of your programs. Ensure the content is relevant, the speaker is engaging, and the agenda fits with your employees’ goals.

Consumable is Best

To keep your employees engaged during each training module, the information delivered should be sectioned in small, manageable bites. The more relatable the content, the better. It helps your employee envision themselves in certain situations. In addition, this will show how it will help them do their job more effectively. The concept of “Micro-Learning” is to take a larger concept and break it down into smaller topics. It helps individuals retain the important pieces of information and allows for better time management. This also takes a lot of the pressure off of employees and minimizes burn-out.

Ensure Credibility of Training Company

When evaluating training memberships for your organization, it’s important to look at the company and instructors, their industry background, and relevant experience. What makes them qualified to deliver these programs? Are they certified in their trade? What is their mission? Why are they experts? Look for a company that has a proven record of success in transforming the modern workplace and has built credibility as leaders in deployment and implementation. See if they can provide you an ROI report so you can measure program effectiveness.

Keep Employees Motivated

Giving your employees regular feedback will keep them motivated throughout their training process. If the training programs are easy, mobile, personalized, and tied to a promotion or advancement, your workforce is more likely to show positive results. If you incorporate development into your company’s culture, it helps to level up everyone’s mindset and positions professional development as a way of life, rather than a daunting task.

Measure training effectiveness

Many training memberships offer a dashboard to track success. This helps to visually show the # of trainings your employees have done and contribute to feedback if they are on track. Empower your leadership team and managers to use these dashboards as conversation starter in annual reviews to show where the employee stands with development and/or what steps must be taken to get to the next level in their career. Get and give honest feedback to ensure the goals are being properly met. Some things to ask yourself when measuring effectiveness would be:

  • How has the training been implemented in their position?
  • Are they sharing knowledge with other employees?
  • How is their morale after they completed the training?
  • Has their quality of work increased?
  • Can you stack business results against the training that they’ve done?
  • Has their productivity improved based on their Key Performance Indicators?

 

In order for companies to thrive in this modern world, continuously developing their employees and encouraging professional growth is the secret ingredient to retention and long-term success. If your goal is to have a high-performing workforce, aligning your strategy with a training membership will take your development initiatives to the next level.