Technology, market dynamics, and industry standards are all changing rapidly—in every industry. Ongoing training can help your team stay up to date on these changes, improving their overall skills, performance, and job satisfaction.
Assessing Training Needs & Developing a Plan
When creating a training plan, you need to ensure that it will help further your business goals. This means aligning team improvements with business growth aspirations.
Skills Analysis
Before you create a training plan, you should conduct a thorough skills gap analysis on your team to best understand what you need to work on.
- Plan. Determine the scope of the training you’d like to undertake, whether it’s an individual or team effort, and how long you want it to last.
- Identify Critical Skills. Identify which skills are most needed for and valued by your company and focus on developing a plan to improve those.
- Measure Actual Skills. Identify and measure your team’s current skills to identify gaps where critical skills may need to be built upon or areas where they already excel.
- Analyze the Data. Rate the critical skills’ importance and measure that against your team’s current skill levels to best prioritize which areas to start with.
- Develop a Plan. At this stage, you must outline the steps to fully understand the scope of training you need to conduct with your existing team to meet the overall goals.
Throughout all these steps, it’s crucial to involve team leads, managers, and direct supervisors. This ensures that the critical skills chosen and assessed are relevant and applicable to the team and the broader company.
Developing a Plan
Once you’ve conducted a skills gap analysis, you can start developing your plan to implement regular training.
- Define learning outcomes and objectives. What is your training goal? If you want your team to master a certain technology or process, that has to be outlined and communicated. The same can be said if the goal is to better a specific skill or skillset.
- Choose the appropriate training methods. Some methods are better suited to a group, while others may be better suited for individual use. Additionally, everyone on your team will have different learning styles. Knowing your team and working collaboratively can help you find the best-fitting training methods.
- Develop training content and materials. Once you know the objectives and methods, you can choose the content that best reflects the desired outcome. Research courses and training materials that align with your goals. HR departments can help customize training programs with a combination of in-house and external resources.
- Implement and evaluate the training program. Be open to change once you’ve started your training program! A course that looked ideal on paper may not actually serve the needs of your team, so you need to be prepared to change ideas.
As your company expands, so should your training programs. Your sales team may grow, requiring new training methods suitable for larger groups. Your business goals may change, which will require an update of skills you want to develop within your teams. Ensuring that your training plans are scalable from the start will set you up for success for months and years to come.
Implementation Strategies
While your training program might seem robust, finding a way to fit it into everyone’s schedule can be a serious challenge. Consider starting with introductory sessions on a bi-weekly or monthly basis to slowly integrate new ideas into daily operations. Ensuring that training is seen as just as important as other tasks can also help employees and managers understand their value.
Interactivity
Keeping training engaging can be difficult in any setting. Hands-on training where the team is engaged in recreating potential scenarios or working directly with new systems can help keep people focused, and peer learning is a great way to reinforce learned techniques. Having one group teach another group what they learned solidifies that knowledge in the minds of the first group while also building rapport with the second.
Gamification and making training fun will also increase engagement. With the rise in online learning, there are many virtual and customizable options available to create game-like modules for teaching a wide variety of skills.
Technology
The rise in remote working and learning has led to a rise in training technologies. These technologies help teams that can’t be in the same location. They can also help managers track progress in a singular online environment.
Learning Management Systems (LMS) and virtual classrooms can provide a hub for reporting, grading, and tracking progress. Employers can see how their team is learning in real-time, and team members can get feedback quickly and easily. There is also a wide variety of mobile learning apps and websites that can keep training engaging and fun while ensuring communication is open and accessible.
Measuring Training Effectiveness
Once you have a training plan in place, you need to be able to measure whether or not it’s effective in achieving your original goals. Using specific metrics and KPIs can give you a framework to assess the effectiveness of your training program. For example, if the intention is that the team is proficient with new technology, the first metric could be their proficiency, and a second one could be the ability to integrate it with their daily tasks outside of training.
Feedback from the team undergoing the training can also be extremely valuable in measuring its effectiveness. If a majority of employees agree that it’s not working for them, that would be an indicator that a new training program is needed. Every team is as unique as the individuals that make it up, so keep in mind that a training program that worked for one group may not work for another.
After the completion of a successful training program, or even after a few months of ongoing sessions, HR should use the data from the training feedback to optimize future training sessions or make current adjustments if possible.
Building a Culture of Continuous Learning
The importance of training and learning needs to be reinforced at every level of an organization. Training and learning require admitting that you don’t know something, and it can be intimidating for employees to ask for support if they feel leaders and managers will be unreceptive.
HR can lead by example, promoting a learning mindset within the organization while being proactive and innovative in implementing training strategies. Continuously looking for places to improve helps the organization grow. By implementing regular training sessions within your organization, employees will feel more comfortable asking for training in specific areas where they feel they need to improve, and the entire team can grow in their roles and, by extension, the organization.
