Employees are the company’s greatest asset, and investing in talent is essential for the company’s sustainable growth and success. Many companies go through lengthy processes to recruit and hire qualified and suitable candidates, but often the focus on employee care stops there. A company that engaged in on-the-job training saw its sales increase and their profits double that of a company that could have had teams that did not participate at all. Dedicated training and development that fosters employee engagement and engagement are critical to your company’s financial performance.
Employee development – the overall process that employers give to employees to help them gradually improve their skills, acquire new knowledge, and progress in their careers.
Employee training – a program designed to develop and enhance technical skills and knowledge to perform a particular job more efficiently, more successfully, or more safely.
Why do you need employee training and development?
Good training and development programs help companies retain the right people and increase profits. As the battle to hire top talent becomes more competitive, employee training and development programs become more important than ever.
Hiring top talent takes time and money, and how a company attracts and converts that talent when it comes to referrals impacts business retention and growth. According to LinkedIn’s 2019 Workplace Learning Survey, 82% of learning and development professionals say their leadership actively supports employee engagement in professional learning, and 59% say they will spend more on their e-learning budget.
Here are the necessary strategies in creating an employee training program
Training is an essential aspect of employee development. But development is not simply a set of training courses taken over time. There must be a separate master plan for development to happen. The role of the business is to create a model for these plans, which will ultimately justify the resources your organization devotes to training.
The following strategies can help companies translate their business goals into a tailored training plan.
- Identify Business Impact:
Design and develop training to achieve overall business goals. Keeping the business goal in sight ensures that training and development have a measurable impact over the long term.
- Analyze Skill Gaps:
How do employee behaviors help achieve business goals? By finding out the gaps between an employee’s current skills, one can determine what specific learning goals are.
Categorize these learning objectives into three groups, Motivation, Proficiency, and Critical Thinking, and have activities in your training plan that target all three of these groups.
Motivation – How can you help learners understand why they need to change their behavior? By working with employee motivations – for example, goal setting – you are more likely to change behavior in the long term.
Critical Thinking – What do your learners need to know to do their job well? Distinguish critical knowledge from information needed to determine what should be in the course and what should be in optional resources.
Proficiency Skills – What do your learners need to be able to do the job? The skills that they need to do their job better.
- Do a Gap Analysis:
Gap analysis is a report that shows where employees of a particular company are currently and where they want to be when it comes to capabilities.
The company probably already has a large amount of data and information to start the gap analysis. Official personnel files may already contain standard job descriptions, performance assessments, and even accident and safety reports. Start with these. If not, it may be worth the investment to get a clear and objective picture of your employees.
- Offer Formal Training:
Now that the preparatory work is complete, it’s time to address the skill gaps of these employees. Formal training programs should be designed as specific training courses for employees.
These should include training in general business and soft skills as well as job-specific skills. The best training programs typically use blended learning with both guided sessions and digital/online media with hands-on knowledge.
With this learning approach, digital courses free up instructor time and free up class time for more productive activities such as group discussions, practice sessions, and Q & A.
- Add Coaching/Mentoring:
An employee training program that creates relationships among employees allows for the development and transfer of knowledge to help less experienced employees grow professionally. Matching mentors and employees is an essential part of creating a successful program:
Experience – There should be no too big or too small gap between the mentor’s experience and the mentee’s experience. Mentors must be able to learn and be challenged, but not overwhelmed.
Expectations – Both parties need to know what to expect from the relationship. For example, the mentor should see the relationship as more than just an opportunity to “share war stories.”
Compatibility- When mentees have similar communication styles and approaches, the relationship is often much more fruitful. For example, you might consider getting a DISC rating and matching employees with similar personality types.
