Investing in employee growth is a must to facilitate business growth. Having a skilled workforce gives your company a competitive advantage over your rivals and makes it easy to achieve business goals. But creating an employee training program is not as straight-forward as it may seem. 

A company’s commitment to employee growth helps in creating a culture of continuous learning and building a great market reputation. It’s important to include the following elements when developing a workforce training program:

• Flexible learning:

Most employees don’t enjoy engaging with a training program because it consumes a lot of time and they have to compromise on work in order to learn. The training program you create for employees should facilitate learning instead of becoming a burden.

Using online learning platforms to deliver training is a great way to ensure flexibility in learning. Platforms like Thought Industries make it convenient to manage employee training courses and allow employees to learn at any time from anywhere.

• Blended learning support:

In today’s day and age, limiting employee training to just online courses is not enough. Businesses need to incorporate engaging ways to ensure employees don’t miss out on the benefits of in-person training.

This is possible by introducing the blended learning approach which allows employees to learn directly from Subject Matter Experts(SMEs) with the help of encrypted video conferencing tools. Blended learning support ensures employees get the best of both worlds.

• Tracking learning progress:

Understanding training effectiveness is necessary to ensure the business will benefit from it. This requires tracking of employee learning progress. Not only it highlights when an employee finished an online course, but also helps in understanding areas of improvement.

This helps in calculating the return on investment for online training. A lot of LMSs also allow you to customize the reports based on your business requirements. With custom reports, it is possible to see individual employee performance graphs. 

• Social learning opportunities:

Because of the pandemic, employees have been forced to learn in isolation. This makes them feel lonely and reduces engagement levels. To combat the monotony, it is necessary to ensure employees get to learn together and discuss their ideas. 

A great way to encourage social learning is to conduct webinars. This gives employees an opportunity to get the benefits of learning from an industry expert without having to travel anywhere. 

• Engaging content:

To ensure employees make the most of a training program, it is vital that the content be fun and engaging. Without this, employees may get bored and leave the training course midway. Make sure the content is easy to understand and capture the learner’s attention. 

You can gamify the content to deliver complex concepts in the form of games. The healthy competition between employees to earn badges and achieve top positions on the leaderboard drives them to stay motivated to learn. 

• Easy to use learning tools:

An essential workforce training element is a platform that allows employees to quickly find what they are looking for. Choose an LMS with an intuitive interface for better navigation and seamless learning. 

A clean and easy-to-use tool will keep your workforce interested in learning and prevent them from getting bored. This motivates them to go through the entire training program and use their knowledge in their everyday work.

Conclusion:

Above everything else, make sure the training program is being developed by expert L&D professionals who take the effort to understand employee learning needs. Additionally, announce the implementation of the workforce training program beforehand and share its benefits with employees so they are excited to learn. Don’t forget to train your managers as well as they play an important role in encouraging employees to grow their knowledge.