Corporate trainings are very important to keep the company and its employees always on top of their game. But they are often neglected and can be better. They should be better.
After all your company is investing big money into trainings. The employees are each company’s greatest asset and it has to invest in them to make them even better at their job. This is where corporate trainings come in as one great way to improve employee’s skills.
Corporate training facts
According to a research by Middlesex University done for Work Based Learning, 74% of employees don’t feel they are achieving their full potential due to lack of development opportunities. A survey by the Association of Talent Development says 62% of HR managers also say they don’t believe they are reaching each individual’s learning needs.
So how are companies responding? They start to invest more in corporate trainings. This is great, but it also brings in a new set of challenges. SHIFT e-learning says a company can lose a total of $13.5 million per year per 1000 employees all due to ineffective trainings. As you can imagine, this is unacceptable.
A little extra effort can do wonders in lowering the losses, it may even turn them around into a long term profit. Most companies simply view a training as-is. They think of it as a set of lessons and that’s that. This is a sure way to guarantee a poor performance of the training.
There are simple ways to improve corporate trainings
Ask the employees
You may think you know what they need, but they know better. Go figure. Ask them what they feel they are lacking in skills to be better at their job. Give them options about what trainings they can sign up for. It may not even be something related to their current position, but it is interesting to them. Allow them to sign up for that, too. It will be beneficial to their overall skill set and they will feel more motivated and appreciated.
Keep them in the loop
Good, now you have the feedback from your employees. Don’t simply take it and crawl back into your office layer. Instead, keep them in the loop of what’s going on. Tell them what possibilities are there for the trainings. For example a classic in-class training, an online training, an e-learning platform or a mixture of all. Different people have different ways to learn so giving them to choose from more options how to complete a training sets the stage for them to get more out of it.
Make trainings interesting
This is tied to the point above. It may lead to a customized training which could be more expensive, but it will also increase its retention rate. This means trainees will learn more and in the end you will get more out of your investment. In order to make it interesting, you should know the preferences of the employees and use them to make the training content a bit more engaging and interesting. For example it may be gamified.
Individual content
If you really want to get the most out of a corporate training, then you will have to dig deeper. You can use behavioral data and machine learning tools to analyze the performance of the employees. This will show you in which areas they lack skills or knowledge and what can be improved. Employees shouldn’t feel like this is a way to monitor them which can cost them their job. Instead, it is a way for them to find out what they may not even realize is stopping their growth and get the company’s help to fix it. Team work all the way!
Show them the benefits, don’t tell them
Finally, a great way to get employees properly motivated and pumped for a corporate training is to show them the benefits of it. Don’t simply tell them they will be better at their jobs. Most of them won’t believe you anyway. Especially since, nothing will really change in day-to-day work after the training is complete. Most of the newly acquired skills and knowledge will work on the “back-end” of employees mind and will help them out without them even realizing it.
So don’t tell them. Show them. Show them specific examples of actual results being improved after a previous training. It may be a personal success story of a few employees or something that changed the entire company. Actually, that last one is especially true. Since the people are the company, when one person grows, the company also grows as a result. Develop your employees to develop the company.
Image credit: Flickr (CC) / Twentyfour Students