Online Induction >> Online Training Platform >> Employee Training Program

Must Have Features In Your Employee Training Program

As part of hiring employees, it's equally important that once you have hired them, you keep them! Putting in place essential tools and programs to increase employee retention and reduce the burdon of constantly training new staff and onboarding them due to high turn over can be a major impact on your retention strategy.

Providing training and personal development opportunities to new staff is one way to help retain your new employees and encourage them to improve their skills and embrace their new role in the organisation. Employee training programs may be divided into two groups, a new hires training program to familiarize themselves with the organization and secondly ongoing training options for the employees beyond their first week. But what features might you have across those two groups to bring about a truly successful employee training program? Especially with a remote workforce in todays emerging remote work world.

Best Features

1. Mobile Learning
Mobile learning facilitates employee engagement via mobile devices which help improve productivity and organizational success straight from their mobile device through learning courses direct to their phone or tablet. A combination of online education and hands on training via mobile provides a better, more accessible and cost effective solution than traditional classroom training methods or desktop based training programs. Mobile learning usually leverages personal handheld gadgets to deliver training courses anytime and anywhere at the trainee's convenience and in short bursts that can be done while travelling on a bus, train or at work.

2. Skills Gap Discovery
This is all about identifying the skills gaps of your employees in order to determine what training they need to do. A training need is typically the gap between the current performance and the desired performance. The needs assessment is best conducted through interviews, internal surveys, and research. So, it's essential to correctly identify the employees who need training and what topics or skills to cover. The training matrix may form part of this skills gap area.

3. Short Course Creation
As part of designing a training program, with todays busy and hectic workforce, setting up short courses to fill the identified gaps is a great and popular way to distribute meaningful training to staff they can actually digest. Designing a list of all the required training in the organization and then ranking what's the most important according to the skills shortages and opportunities for learning improvement. The training courses need some preparations to be set up to cover the right content.

Getting in touch with subject experts is a pretty good idea to correctly structure the short courses and makes the entire content creation process more straightforward and easier to achieve. These might be department heads of front line workers who have domain knowledge or field experience who could help ensure courses truly reflect what the workplace needs. The courses should be grouped into categories such as general sessions, mission-specific sessions, etc. They must be designed in a way that the trainee can complete one after the other efficiently.

4. Multimedia Content
Plain text content is now outdated, and nowadays, an effective training program must be beyond basic text-based education. It should take advantage of the available multimedia options to create an interactive, engaging, and more diverse training experience.

You can consider one of these multimedia options in the training program to make it more efficient:

- Images: Diagrams, infographics, and photos can grab the employee's attention and demonstrate concepts better than written step-by-step content.
- Audio: content and podcasts are common ways employees can learn while still performing other duties.
- Video: A combination of visual and audio information creates an extremely memorable and engaging training medium.
- Interactive content: It contains tasks for the employees to complete, such as polls and quizzes or gameplay and community boards to encourage them to participate fully in training.

The trainees will be more engaged with the instructional information supplied if it is more than just words on a page. Besides, LMS solutions enhance the creation and importation of multimedia content into your training program.

5. Micro-learning
The average attention span of an individual is eight seconds which means if you read this far, you're doing better than most! With microlearning, an employer can deliver short specific bursts of content that can hold the interest of an employee better and help them to actually retain the information from the microlearning course.

The whole idea is to take topics and transform them into small content pieces that are easy to understand and digest in space pieces.

6. Assessments
Effective training programs always have a way of measuring how the training has impacted the employees. They are essential in identifying the employees who have mastered the training, the ones who still need more help, and where the training program needs improvement.

It is an excellent idea to encourage all the organization employees to continue learning new skills, perfect old ones, and develop entirely as professionals. Well-rounded employees in the workplace have a better chance for advancements, and their wide range of skills significantly boosts your business. So, beyond making your workers more productive and happier, numerous revenue benefits come with adequate training of your employees.

Ready to setup an Employee Training Program?

Check out these templates, examples and course builder