Good training and development programs help you retain the right people and grow profits. As the battle for top talent becomes more competitive, employee training and development programs are more important than ever. Hiring top talent takes time and money, and how you engage and develop that talent from the time they are first onboard impacts retention and business growth.
High-impact training and development programs don’t just happen. Instead, they’re the result of a careful planning and alignment process. The following steps can help you translate business objectives into a tailored training plan.
- Identify Business Impact: Design and develop your training to meet the company’s overall goals. Keeping business goals in focus ensures training and development makes a measurable impact.
- Analyze Skill Gaps: How are your employees’ behaviors helping meet the business goal? By finding out what the gaps are between employees’ current and ideal skills, you can better pinpoint what your specific learning objectives should be. Categorize these learning objectives into these three groups, and have activities in your training plan that target all three.
- Motivation: How can you help learners understand why they need to change their behaviors? By working with employee motivations–for example, pinpointing a purpose–you’re more likely to change behavior over the long term.
- Skills Mastery: What do your learners need to be able to do on the job? These behaviors will have the most impact on performance.
- Critical Thinking: What must your learners know to perform their jobs well? Distinguish critical knowledge from nice-to-know info to identify what content should be in the course, and what should be in optional resources.
- Layer Training Methods: The most effective training programs use layered, sustainable learning activities to create performance improvement over time. A layered approach makes sure your program targets the most essential employee, customer, and business needs, while training the right people at the right time in the right way. A layered approach is the best of all worlds because it blends learning experiences and training methods that maximize the benefits of your time.
- Evaluate Effectiveness and Sustain Gains: Employees’ need for training and support doesn’t end when they get back to work. In fact, continued support is required to ensure that initial training sticks. Measurable learning objectives are the foundation for you to evaluate an initiative’s impact.
Top companies invest in training programs because they know the investment pays off in individual and organizational benefits. Here are a few examples.
Organization
- Profit growth
- Reduced employee turnover
- Deeper talent succession pipelines
Individual
- Increased employee motivation
- Improved engagement
- Improved speed to competency and productivity