Employee Training
In recent times, employee training has become an essential aspect of business organizations. The most successful organizations are the ones that provide effective training. Both new hires and existing employees need to receive training to perform their jobs effectively. The new hires must know the organization's business and their roles in it. The existing employees need to learn new skills and achieve their goals. Both will ultimately help the company.
Types of Employee Training
Following are the types of employee training required for any organization.
1. Orientation: This is typically the first training a new employee receives after entering the workplace. The purpose of orientation is to familiarize new hires with the organization's mission, vision, and values and its corporate culture, major corporate policies, essential employee benefits, and organizational structure.
2. Onboarding: This training is department or function-specific, in which the employee will be working. This training helps the new employee to fit in and succeed in their new roles. For example, the pre-sales team would provide training mapped to cold-calling and emails, filtering out potential client contacts from databases, offering a quick overview about the company over a phone-call, etc..
3. Technical training: Tools and techniques are the keys to accomplishing any task and this training would take care of that. For example, specific software needs to be used for maintaining data in the Ware House. The fresh recruits working for Ware House management must undergo this training.
4. Soft-skills training: Soft skills are coveted attributes necessary for employees' personal development as well as essential for an effective, polite, and collaborative workplace culture. Communication skills, presentation skills, problem-solving skills, conflict resolution skills, leadership skills, emotional intelligence, time-management skills, ethics, teamwork, and adaptability are the key skills that come under the ambit of soft-skills.. Training on soft skills is role-specific.
5. Product and Services Training: This is an essential training that deals with the most important aspect of the business. A new hire needs to know about these as well as an existing employee needs to know about new products and services that are rolling out. For example, to sell a new model of smartphone, the existing salesperson must be trained on the functionalities.
6. Compliance Training: Last but not the least, this training is to educate the employees about rules and regulations, laws and legal consequences, etc. For example, to sell a product or service, one must be aware of the application of TDS and GST.
Conducting an Employee Training Program – Classroom Mode
A training manager in any organization needs to follow a set process for every training program that includes planning, conducting, evaluating, and administrating the training programs in person. This might require a team to create online calendars, arrange for training infrastructure and resources, communicate to the employees about the training, monitor attendance, compare planned vs. actual training programs conducted, and provide performance feedback to learners. The trainer has to evaluate the performance of the learners. The cost of training infrastructure, resources, and person-hours may add up to a big amount that often exceeds the ROI of the training.
From the learners’ point of view, learning in a fixed timeframe of 1 or 2 hours may be difficult. Also, one has to re-schedule the work planned for the day. What happens if there is a critical deliverable scheduled for an important customer on the training day? If the assessment scores of the training add up to the overall performance, how does the employee prioritize between work and training? In short, it becomes a stressful task for both the trainer and the learner.
Developing Effective eLearning Training Programs
To build a successful and effective eLearning training program, the following tasks may be taken into account:
A. Audience analysis: For any training, the first and foremost task is to know the audience and understand their requirements. For example, the following factors can be considered to understand the audience profile:
1. Learning objectives
2. Roles and responsibilities of the audience
2. Years of experience
3. Current skill level
3. Expected skill/ performance levels after the training
4. Tools/ techniques required for their roles
B. Training content customization: The learning content needs to be developed based on the audience analysis. For example, content for sales training at the entry-level cannot be the same as that of the sales manager. Customizing the content helps meet the learning objectives.
C. Identifying the learning platform: A typical LMS (Learning Management System) platform provides the following functionalities:
1. Virtual classrooms: This includes streaming videos, online broadcasting, interactive chats and discussions, one-to-one real-time communication, feedback feature, and Q&A sessions.
2. Tools to evaluate learners’ skills: Along with evaluation methods (online tests), a dashboard showing the skill levels (before and after the training) of learners helps the training managers understand the effectiveness of the training.
3. Administration: It is important to maintain the basic level of training administration such as tracking the progress of learning, attendance, number of tests attended, etc. Apart from these, online calendars, upload/ download options, social media sharing, instant messages or announcements, discussion forums, etc. make the learning environment comfortable for the learners.
These are one-time tasks and once completed, can be re-used for the selected audience groups.
Reasons to Choose eLearning
The present generation of millennials wants freedom and flexibility in every aspect of life, especially during the pandemic time when online classes became a way of life. Learners have realized the benefits of eLearning. Why should the new generation of employees choose eLearning over the classroom? Let’s look at the reasons.
1. Learning content: eLearning programs can use games, visuals, stories, and collaborations that make the programs more engaging for the learners. Also, simulations of tasks can make employees job-ready.
2. Flexible time, place, and pace: One can attend the training at any time, at any place and the pace of learning is not frozen into 1 or 2 hours of classroom time. This maintains a healthy work-life balance by being part of a comfortable and stress-free learning environment.
3. Customization: eLearning training programs provide personalized and timely content over standard content for all learners with different skill levels.
4. Access to training material: The training material can be watched repeatedly by the participant at any time and for any number of times. This leads to better retention of knowledge. During an offline session, the learners would not have this liberty.
5. Blended learning: Trainers from all over the world can provide online training if necessary. This presents a wonderful chance for interaction with seasoned individuals who may be quite inspiring for the staff.
6. Cost-saving: The cost of running eLearning programs is less than the classroom training because it does not require additional infrastructure (e.g., training room, projector, light, sitting arrangements, administration by people, etc.)
The New Normal
Most companies like IBM, Samsung, Panasonic, Nokia, Coca Cola, and Pepsi (to name a few) already have adopted eLearning training programs over classroom training. If we consider the benefits, eLearning takes the lead, and if we consider the preference of the new generation of employees, we already know the answer. Leading industry experts are providing corporate training solutions using eLearning programs. The coming years will see an increasing usage of eLearning to deliver workplace training and help organizations meet their learning and development goals.
S4Carlisle – Delivering World-Class eLearning Employee Training Programs
At S4Carlisle, we work closely with our clients to develop personalized eLearning employee training programs. From video-based microlearning programs to full-fledged eLearning courses that cover different aspects of the training content and feature multiple content formats, we design eLearning solutions, which help your organization meet your L&D goals. Write to us at sales@s4carlisle.com for further details.
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