A workplace training program allows you to strengthen the skills that each employee needs to improve. It addresses employee weakness, provides the necessary training, and creates an overall knowledgeable workforce that works independently without constant help from others.
What is Employee Training And Development (From A To Z)
Written by: Josh Brown
Back in the days of the Industrial Revolution, philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed the carrot-and-stick approach to motivation. Based on an old anecdote, this theory suggested that people could be motivated by reward and punishment.
Well, surprisingly or not, it’s not money. It’s employee training and development. Lauren Hasson, Founder of DevelopHer, states that "when employees feel invested in and that their value is recognized, their engagement and loyalty to a business tends to increase which in turn positively impacts a businesses the bottom line."
Case in point: A staggering 94% of all employees interviewed for LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report said that they would stay longer with a company that invested in their careers. In another survey, Udemy found that learning and development is the most important benefit to almost half of Millennials.
As Career Coach Emily Eliza Moyer says, “If managers can guide employees to connect their individual purpose back to the work they do every day, and even better, back to the company mission, they’ll be drawing from the deepest source of motivation. Purpose is the greatest driver for both impact and fulfillment.”
With AI and other technologies advancing at ultrasonic speed, the importance of training and development is growing as well. Deloitte predicts that 54% of all employees will require significant reskilling and upskilling in just three years. According to SHRM, HR professionals are already having difficulty recruiting due to skills shortage.
11 Types of Employee Training Programs in 2022
1. Orientation Training
An effective employee orientation training provides basic organizational information that new hires need to prepare for their role in a company. The orientation program benefits both employee and employer by educating new hires, setting them up for success in their new role, addressing any questions they may have, and helping them contribute to the organization right away.
2. Onboarding Training
Employee orientation is a 1-2 days process whereas the employee onboarding process is a series of events that take place for a duration of a week, a month, or even a year in some cases. Onboarding is responsible for truly integrating an employee within an organization.
3. Compliance Training
An effective compliance training program helps prevent poor conduct and ensures proper governance in an organization. It helps minimize risks, maintains reputation, and provides a better and safe workplace environment for employees.
- Anti-harassment: Anti-harassment compliance training programs administer guidance and measures for responding to incidents like bullying, harassment, and sexual harassment.
- Diversity training: Diversity training emphasizes the strengths of diversity and addresses how to work with people of different ethnicities, genders, sexual orientation, age, mental or physical abilities, etc.
- Cybersecurity: These programs include how to efficiently manage sensitive and confidential information, and train staff on the strategies, tools, and systems needed to protect personal data.
- Business ethics: The ethics & compliance training programs include risk assessment training, methods to encourage whistleblowing, accountability structures, and a system for addressing grey areas/conflicts of interest.
4. Product Training
Depending on different employee roles, product training can focus on different aspects and have different learning goals. Value-adding product training enables a marketing team to reach the right market, and a sales team to answer the critical questions customers are looking for.
5. Leadership Training
Leadership training for your existing leaders is a way to refresh and reset their mindset. On the other hand, leadership training for other employees helps them better understand their current roles and learn what it takes to become exceptional leaders in the future.
6. Technical Training
There is an infinite number of new software applications and technologies emerging in every industry. In order to avoid the risk of falling behind the competition, employees need to continuously adopt the latest technologies or update existing ones. Technical training enables your workforce to build core technical skills and master the technical aspects of their jobs.
- Demonstrate a clear link between technical training and career progression to keep employees motivated and engaged throughout the course.
- Demonstrate how technical training can positively impact an employee’s real work.
- Use subject matter experts to enable effective instructor-led training sessions.
- Allow learners to customize their training to make them engage more with the content.
- Lecture-based, hours-long training is no longer an effective mode of training for the modern workforce. Deliver your technical training courses with easy to understand interactive methods like:
- provide the help required to carry out a particular task in a step-by-step interactive manner.
- Gamification to teach practical applications.
- Interactive video training to boost engagement with more interactive e-learning content formats.
Digital Adoption Platforms enables training content integration within the software. It gives employees access to all relevant information, resources, documentation, and workflows that they might need to work efficiently on new software. This guidance can be accessed whenever an employee is stuck anywhere in the software, without having to look for any external help.
7. Quality Assurance Training
Quality assurance training helps employees better understand quality assurance activities and improve processes that ensure the final product or service meets set quality standards which lead to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
8. Sales Training
Sales training is designed to improve your sales team’s skills by teaching them sales techniques, software tools, and novel approaches to selling. Effective sales training programs focus on helping sales teams define the benefits of products and services, address the unmet needs of the client and get them one step closer to a purchase.
5 Tips for Creating Employee Training Programs for Your Workplace
1. Create Interactive Training Content
To overcome the traditional culture of monotonous PowerPoint slides and traditional learning methods, L&D teams are embracing a new style of training that’s interactive. Interactive training engages each individual and connects them to a task by putting them in the driver’s seat. Interactive learning focuses on learner’s engagement which leads to higher productivity and performance.
2. Leverage Workplace Training Software
Employee training software and corporate learning management systems are leveraged to deliver online employee training experiences. This training software allows you to create training modules efficiently, make them engaging, securely deliver them to the employees, track employee engagement with the training materials, analyze performance, and give feedback. It is an all-in-one tool to deliver effective training to your workforce.
A digital adoption platform (DAP) is a training software that integrates with your enterprise applications in order to help the user learn while working on the application itself. DAP uses interactive walkthroughs, videos, and self-help menus to guide users through every aspect of the application.
3. Set Employee Training Goals
Identifying the purpose of your training puts you in the right direction for creating and setting realistic employee training goals and objectives. Your organization’s training goals are measurable outcomes that learners are expected to achieve by the end of a training program.
Setting goals is a key responsibility of managers to offer their employees some guidance and motivate them to attend the next training program. To define clear and measurable goals, consider using the SMART goals framework (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based).
4. Segment Training Programs
A digital adoption platform is an employee training solution that integrates with digital tools to provide automated, personalized training in the flow of work. It has artificial intelligence (AI) technology that determines the learner’s role in the company, personal development goals, and current training needs to suggest the right training module.
5. Measure Training Effectiveness with Employee Surveys
Training effectiveness measures the impact of a training program on the employee’s knowledge, skills, and performance. In addition, measuring training effectiveness is also an important tool to boost employee engagement and retention as it demonstrates a positive impact of training.
Measuring training effectiveness via employee surveys might seem basic, but they are extremely critical in getting the answers to determine whether or not your training was successful. The process here is to create anonymous employee surveys and feedback forms, collect feedback in real-time, measure the training immediately and implement remedies without any delays.
Whatfix DAP helps measure training effectiveness by intelligently gathering feedback on each walkthrough training and determining where your content creation efforts will give the best results. The SaaS platform integrates with survey tools to gather user feedback from specific locations (in-app) to assure higher response rates.
Resources:
https://helpjuice.com/blog/employee-training-development
https://whatfix.com/blog/types-employee-training-programs/
https://www.uscreen.tv/blog/6-types-online-employee-training-programs/
Employee training
Consider setting up meetings at the end of the first week and month, then again at three months, six months, and twelve months. This regular check-in should not be punitive. The goal here is a happy, supported, productive employee.
How to Train Your New Employees Effectively
You wouldn’t hand a new high school graduate the keys to a Tesla and let them go, but this is an exaggerated equivalent of some company new hire training programs. Learning how to train new employees effectively is the cornerstone of success for any company. This post is your guide to better and more effective new hire training. Keep reading to learn more.
Some companies believe that new employees will learn as they go, on the job, foregoing a new hire training program. While there is plenty of space for on-the-job training, knowing how to train new employees effectively means happier employees and better retention rates.
According to some estimates, the cost of replacing employees who make $30,000 a year or less is 16% of their annual salary. But for higher-level employees, those making over $75,000, that number can be 20% of their annual salary or higher. So, once you find the best employees for your team, you want to keep them there. And, following some best practices for employee onboarding is one of the most effective ways to do so.
11 Types of Employee Training Programs in 2022
1. Orientation Training
An effective employee orientation training provides basic organizational information that new hires need to prepare for their role in a company. The orientation program benefits both employee and employer by educating new hires, setting them up for success in their new role, addressing any questions they may have, and helping them contribute to the organization right away.
2. Onboarding Training
Employee orientation is a 1-2 days process whereas the employee onboarding process is a series of events that take place for a duration of a week, a month, or even a year in some cases. Onboarding is responsible for truly integrating an employee within an organization.
3. Compliance Training
An effective compliance training program helps prevent poor conduct and ensures proper governance in an organization. It helps minimize risks, maintains reputation, and provides a better and safe workplace environment for employees.
- Anti-harassment: Anti-harassment compliance training programs administer guidance and measures for responding to incidents like bullying, harassment, and sexual harassment.
- Diversity training: Diversity training emphasizes the strengths of diversity and addresses how to work with people of different ethnicities, genders, sexual orientation, age, mental or physical abilities, etc.
- Cybersecurity: These programs include how to efficiently manage sensitive and confidential information, and train staff on the strategies, tools, and systems needed to protect personal data.
- Business ethics: The ethics & compliance training programs include risk assessment training, methods to encourage whistleblowing, accountability structures, and a system for addressing grey areas/conflicts of interest.
4. Product Training
Depending on different employee roles, product training can focus on different aspects and have different learning goals. Value-adding product training enables a marketing team to reach the right market, and a sales team to answer the critical questions customers are looking for.
5. Leadership Training
Leadership training for your existing leaders is a way to refresh and reset their mindset. On the other hand, leadership training for other employees helps them better understand their current roles and learn what it takes to become exceptional leaders in the future.
6. Technical Training
There is an infinite number of new software applications and technologies emerging in every industry. In order to avoid the risk of falling behind the competition, employees need to continuously adopt the latest technologies or update existing ones. Technical training enables your workforce to build core technical skills and master the technical aspects of their jobs.
- Demonstrate a clear link between technical training and career progression to keep employees motivated and engaged throughout the course.
- Demonstrate how technical training can positively impact an employee’s real work.
- Use subject matter experts to enable effective instructor-led training sessions.
- Allow learners to customize their training to make them engage more with the content.
- Lecture-based, hours-long training is no longer an effective mode of training for the modern workforce. Deliver your technical training courses with easy to understand interactive methods like:
- provide the help required to carry out a particular task in a step-by-step interactive manner.
- Gamification to teach practical applications.
- Interactive video training to boost engagement with more interactive e-learning content formats.
Digital Adoption Platforms enables training content integration within the software. It gives employees access to all relevant information, resources, documentation, and workflows that they might need to work efficiently on new software. This guidance can be accessed whenever an employee is stuck anywhere in the software, without having to look for any external help.
7. Quality Assurance Training
Quality assurance training helps employees better understand quality assurance activities and improve processes that ensure the final product or service meets set quality standards which lead to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
8. Sales Training
Sales training is designed to improve your sales team’s skills by teaching them sales techniques, software tools, and novel approaches to selling. Effective sales training programs focus on helping sales teams define the benefits of products and services, address the unmet needs of the client and get them one step closer to a purchase.
Case studies or other required reading
Finally, some employee training topics are readily accessible through required readings. Case studies, in particular, can provide a quick way for employees to learn about real workplace issues. Employees can read through these at their own pace, or while working in a team-building session with other employees.
At EdgePoint Learning, we know that employee training is only effective when it’s engaging. The best way to do that is to start from the beginning and consider the best types of training methods for your workforce, your needs, and your resources. Once you do that, you can create rich learning opportunities that empower and truly engage your employees.
From full custom development to comprehensive instructional strategy, our experts at EdgePoint Learning can also help you develop better employee training programs, for a variety of training methods. We specialize in eLearning, as well as innovative training solutions like geofenced mobile training and microlearning.
Since most employees can only dedicate 1% of their workweek to training, it’s time to make those 24 minutes more effective, more engaging, and maybe even a little fun. We’re here for better employee training, and we hope you are too.
Resources:
https://www.edgepointlearning.com/blog/how-to-train-new-employees/
https://whatfix.com/blog/types-employee-training-programs/
https://www.edgepointlearning.com/blog/top-10-types-of-employee-training/
Employee training
This may be where you need to call in the professionals. Work with employee-training experts to select learning methods that align with your company’s needs and vision. These pros can help you allocate your investment to the right categories to get the results you need.
Employee Education: Why Training Is Important and How to Make Programs Work
Business owners largely understand that their employees need reliable hardware, high-quality protective gear, and up-to-date software to perform their tasks. But many fail to recognize another pillar of employment: effective training. They see the costs of implementing an employee training and development program as incompatible with their long-term business objectives.
But to retain a happy, fulfilled, and productive workforce, research validates the importance of employee training. According to a 2020 Work Institute survey , 20% of employees who voluntarily left a job did so because of a lack of career-development opportunities, including training or upskilling. This turnover costs US businesses $630 billion annually, or about $15,000 per employee departure.
In today’s competitive employment field, with labor shortages worsening, employee training and development can attract and retain talent. Companies can also use training to enhance employee performance; boost productivity; and improve their culture, reputation, and revenue. The cost of implementing employee training is a small price to pay compared to the lost skills, lost workers, and lost opportunities in the big picture.
How to build an employee training and development program
Choose staff that align with your culture
Company culture describes the values, beliefs, and attitudes your retail business has. Every employee needs to buy into company culture, not just to give consistent customer service, but so they feel like they’re working toward a bigger-picture vision.
Alissa continues, “When the core team is happy and everyone genuinely enjoys what they are doing, work performance and customer service run at their best. Therefore, before training begins, we believe our most essential and effective training technique is selecting employees that fit our company culture.”
Align with business goals
If you’re focusing on opening more stores, for example, you’d likely need to invest more time in teaching staff how to manage a store without your guidance. On the other hand, if you’re prioritizing customer experiences, you’ll need to train employees on what those look like (and how to deliver them).
Identify needs and gaps
Identify any needs and gaps in your current team. Can they use your point-of-sale (POS) system? Are they well educated on the products they’re selling? How well can they design a visual merchandising display? Each of those tasks has different skills—some of which your team could be lacking.
“I find the most important first step to training new employees is to document, in a very detailed fashion, all job requirements and what the job will be like before you even start looking for someone to fill the position.”
Your workflows don’t have to be complicated. Shopify’s mobile POS comes with a fully-customizable checkout and home screen, so you can speed up workflows, checkout, and empower store associates to serve customers wherever they are.
Solicit feedback from staff
Have they taken part in an employee training program at a previous retail job? What did they like (and not like) about it? The answers could help you build a training program that convinces employees to work for you, rather than a competitor with limited training.
Give constructive feedback
“Since we want our employees to feel empowered, we encourage them to use their best judgement in all situations, and we give them feedback to help them improve or even to tell them we would’ve handled it the same way.”
Vicky goes on to explain, “We did this with our latest new hire, Chloe. When she had a question about how to handle a situation, we talked it out with her on the phone. Once she decided how she would like to handle it, we gave her feedback to let her know what we might have done differently.
Set and track measurable goals/milestones
Let the employee know how you define success for the first 90 days of the job on day one. For example, you may expect them to be proficient in a certain computer system, to have produced a specific number of proposals, have a sales pipeline of a certain size, and so on.
Justin Singer of Mekanix Calisthenics Gym
Justin continues, “Take the time to go over everything with them when they start. Then schedule 30-, 60-, and 90-day checkpoint meetings on day one. I usually schedule each of these as lunches and let the new employee know this is a chance for us to touch base and see how things are going.”
If you have a new retail assistant, for example, their goal might be to give a short presentation to a co-worker on a product you stock to improve their knowledge. For experienced store managers looking for extra responsibility to manage another local store, that might be to increase foot traffic to their existing location by 20%.
Popular types of employee training methods
1. Instructor-led training
Instructor-led training happens when an existing team member teaches new hires how to do a specific task. It’s a good option if you’re teaching hard skills with a strict process—like stocking inventory, using your POS system, or processing returns.
2. E-learning/web-based training
Each e-learning course can have different training modules for things that don’t need in-person tutoring. That could include information on improving product knowledge, understanding the psychology behind why people buy, and customer service best practices.
Turning your development program into an online learning course makes it easily accessible. You can upload videos, transcripts, and audio clips to your program. However, because staff often need to complete them in their own time, they might struggle to find the time to concentrate on doing so.
3. Hands-on or in-person training
This kind of training is conducted on the spot and is based on the unique needs of the employee. It incorporates real-life activities. Although this is a time-consuming and tiresome strategy, it can be beneficial if the right resources are available.
William Munir, CEO of Grooming Hut
4. Lectures
Lectures are used to deliver important information, answer questions, and have group discussions. You could use them to motivate staff to reach an upcoming goal, or to explain the strategy for a new pop-up store you’re opening in the local mall.
5. Group discussion and team-building activities
So, how does this relate to your training program? If you’re teaching them to create a visual merchandising display, appeal to people’s competitive streaks by dividing your staff into teams. Give a reward to the team who makes the best storefront display.
Or, put staff into groups of two and turn your store into a “minefield.” Have one wear a blindfold and the other guide them from the door to the checkout desk. It’ll put their communication skills to the test.
6. Role playing
7. Self-instruction
Ask a retail associate to explain why they do a certain task, and I’ll bet they struggle—despite doing it every day. It’s easy to teach a repeatable process. But helping staff understand why it needs to be done that way, not so much.
Self-instruction is a training method that works using self-talk. Include it as part of your employee training and development program by asking staff to talk through the steps they’re doing, and why. (Bonus if you can tie this in with another method like mentorship.)
For example: if you have a retail associate who knows how to track inventory, ask them to walk through the process with new hires. Turning a mental to-do list into an explanation can help staff realize why it’s important.
8. Audiovisual training
9. Orientations
Remember: the first impression you make on new hires has a huge impact on how long they’ll stick around. Most new employees decide whether they feel “at home” in a new job during their first three weeks. Make sure your training investment doesn’t go to waste.
10. Case studies
Case studies are real-life stories of how your products have helped a customer solve a problem or meet their goals. They’re not just good sales assets; case studies are fantastic assets for training your team.
Let’s put that into practice and say one of your customers wrote a review. It explained how your workout equipment helped them lose 11 pounds. Chances are, losing weight is a pain point most of your other customers have. So, give that information to your sales team and use it to inspire your training program.
Show them how to promote the case study to new shoppers who are on the fence about buying a treadmill. Have the salesperson who closed the original sale deliver mini-training on how they did it. It’s like giving staff a blueprint to make customers happy.
11. Job rotations and shadowing
On-the-job training is a quick way to bring new team members up to speed in a certain role. Shadowing is a technique you can use to do this. It partners new employees (or those wanting to move into a different role) with a team member already doing it.
The most popular shadowing partnership is with new sales associates. A new hire fresh out of college with no retail experience can follow an experienced assistant around the sales floor. They’ll learn how to organize stock, talk to customers, and take payment at the checkout desk.
12. Simulations
Kinesthetic learners pick up new skills and information by doing something practical. Simulations give them a way to do that individually by simulating real-life situations they’ll likely handle in their role—like handling customer complaints—before it happens for real.
New technology is emerging that helps retailers train their staff with simulations. One of those technologies is augmented reality (AR)—a live video stream that overlays product information over items in your store.
94%
Companies of all sizes across all industries have a lot to gain from employee training. Many leading businesses recognize these benefits, making staff training and development a core element of their company culture.
Change is a constant in every industry. So training employees to adapt and innovate is vital for businesses of any kind. Restaurant employee training helps food and hospitality companies evolve along with customer expectations. Financial institutions implement employee training to keep current with evolving regulations. Meanwhile, retail employee training is key for satisfying the changing tastes of today’s shoppers.
The latest insights from TalentLMS
Train your people. Measure results. Drive growth.
Resources:
https://redshift.autodesk.com/importance-of-employee-training/
https://www.shopify.com/retail/employee-training
https://www.talentlms.com/solutions/employee-training-software