Investing in Employee Training

Quality employee training is an essential part of an organization’s success. As new staff members are brought on, it’s important to make sure they are trained thoroughly for their new position in order for them to be a real asset. When new policies or new technologies are implemented, existing staff must be trained to ensure they understand these changes.

Though these concepts seem like common sense, sufficient employee training is often lacking. A recent KPMG survey uncovered a significant amount of dissatisfaction in workplace training. Reasons cited for insufficient employee training include budget and time constraints. The survey also uncovered a disconnect between those who create training plans and those who use them, suggesting that perhaps employees are not receiving the appropriate training they need to do their jobs well.

A recent Forbes article discusses job satisfaction survey results in which only 19% of survey respondents reported being satisfied with their jobs. One of the recommendations for increasing employee job satisfaction was to increase workplace training and education.

So, how can you ensure that your employee training plans are effective? Invest time and resources. Even if you don’t have a large budget for training, you can still take the time to ensure that employees are learning the skills they most need. You can do this by:

Conduct a needs assessment. Create your own employee survey or hold interviews to collect data. Your employees can be your best source of information on what types of training they need.
Identify training objectives. This simple step is often skipped because of time constraints but if you don’t start with objectives, you are setting yourself up for failure. Training content should be mapped to solid objectives in order to garner the best results.
Invest in applying an instructional design process to your training. The ADDIE model is one of the most popular instructional design methods (you can learn more about that here), and if you don’t have the budget to hire an instructional designer, you can apply the steps of the ADDIE model yourself. Going through this process will help ensure that your training is well-organized, thorough, and meets the needs of the learners.
Deliver training in multiple formats. Some training skills may be best taught one-on-one, while other skills or knowledge may be best delivered in a classroom setting with an instructor. There is much training that can be delivered as self-study (job aids, eLearning, etc.) as long as it is well-designed and engaging. Take the time to examine how particular training should be delivered.
Measure the effectiveness of the training. This can be done by simply talking to employees about how satisfied they are with the training and how effective it is at helping them do their jobs. You can also use employee surveys to get this type of information, but personal follow up can glean more useful information, particularly about how to improve training.

If you’d like to learn more about how to implement a successful training program for your organization, contact us.