Here’s a guide on the important training for employees that want to improve their skills and boost their productivity.
Employee training is important for any organization. Unfortunately, many employees view training as an unnecessary task. To make matters worse, most employee training does not achieve its purpose.
About 70 percent of employees believe they don’t have the skills they need to perform their duties in the workplace.
There are different types of training for employees and each is designed to suit different situations.
When you use the right employee training at the right time, your employees will enjoy a more engaging and effective learning process that will improve business outcomes. Read on to find out the training programs that employees must undergo.
What is Employee Training?
Employee training allows employees to develop the knowledge they need to carry out their duties while contributing to the growth and development of their organizations.
They are created to help employees develop different skills to perform their duties effectively, improve their efficiency, boost their performance, and adhere to the organization’s laws and regulations.
Top Training Programs for Employees
1. Orientation Training
Orientation training involves welcoming and introducing new staff to the company. It involves guiding new employees through the basics of their duties so that they can be well-prepared for their first day at work.
Orientation training (which is a one-day training) usually covers the topics below:
- The culture and policies of the company
- Vision and values of the company
- Office tours
- Structure of the organization
- New hire paperwork, and
- Administrative procedures (for instance, setting up of workspace and creating login details)
2. Onboarding Training
If you want your new employees to settle quickly into their new roles, then you need to make them undergo onboarding training. This form of training familiarizes employees with the tools they will use to discharge their duties.
An onboarding training can last for as long as it takes your employees to understand their job skills and address every topic that the employees need to perform their tasks.
3. Quality Assurance Training
Quality assurance is another important training for employees. It helps employees to have a better understanding of the quality assurance tasks and also improves processes that ensure the activities of the employee align with quality standards.
Quality assurance training ensures that the final product or service delivered aligns with set quality standards, it leads to customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Some of the benefits of quality assurance training include the following:
- It helps customers to trust your organization.
- It improves ROI and also boosts company growth.
- Quality assurance training prioritizes the delivery of quality services.
- It brings about the development of an engaged and educated employee base.
- This form of training also helps to develop valuable customer relationships.
4. Team Training
Team training helps to develop team dynamics. It also ensures that each member of the team in an organization has access to the same type of professional growth avenues. Team training also boosts employees’ morale and satisfaction.
Here are steps you can follow to implement team training in your organization:
- Use the input of your team to know the type of training they need.
- Design a training schedule that is suitable for every member of the team.
- Let there be team-building sessions across all the departments that are working towards achieving the same objectives.
- Explain the role of individual contributions to the objective of the entire team so that they can have a sense of purpose.
- Focus on helping your team members develop good team-building skills so that the employees can be united to achieve a common goal and boost productivity.
- Focus on meeting the learning needs of your team.
- Follow up with your team members after training sessions.
5. Technical Skills Training
Are your employees skilled at accounting, writing quotations, programming, or writing content but they still need to improve (especially if they need to use certain technical skills in their roles)? Then your employees need to undergo technical skills training.
You can either outsource your technical skills training to another company or get it done internally. A senior employee can train the junior staff. Also, you can manage your internal technical skill training by using an LMS.
6. Managerial Training
You need to have the right skills before you can be promoted. After spending some time in a position, the company will either promote you or consider you for a better managerial position. In such cases, you need to have managerial training.
Even if an employee is great at what he or she does, there are some skills that the employee needs to obtain before he or she becomes a manager. These skills will be enhanced during managerial training.
Some of the benefits of managerial training include the following:
- It brings about proper delegation.
- It helps employees to develop insights on providing proper feedback.
- Managerial training also helps employees to maintain motivation in their teams.
7. Leadership Training
This is a form of soft-skill training that helps employees to develop interpersonal abilities, but with a focus on leadership skills and qualities that influence leadership.
Leadership training is usually overlooked but a bad leader usually leads to a bad result for everyone.
It helps to focus on building foundational skills. It also helps employees develop their communication skills, project management, and leadership skills.
This form of training can also help to develop crisis management skills and other knowledge that requires the use of management-specific tools. It is important to note that you cannot replace leadership training with career coaching.
However, it can be enhanced by useful ongoing training.
8. Product Training
Product training caters to all products or services that you offer. The training briefly touches the selling points of each of the products or services.
This important training for employees is given to customer service representatives, salespeople, and other members of the product team.
Product training helps employees to know about the features of the products or services in their organization. It covers the features, commonly asked questions, and warranty of the product.
The essence of this type of training is to help employees understand their company’s offerings.
Product training cannot replace sales training because it does not emphasize selling the product.
9. Sales Training
Although it is similar to product training, sales training focuses on the selling points of a product or service instead of the basic product details.
Sales training helps employees know how they can advocate for the product, answer difficult questions asked by customers, and promote the unique features of the product. It also equips the team with the skills they need to sell the product.
Role-playing is usually used to help employees have a firsthand understanding of how they can effectively sell their products and services.
10. Diversity Training
Diversity training is important training for employees that helps employees to know about the diversity issues in the workplace. This form of training aims to support positive interactions and reduce discrimination among staff.
This training encourages employees to collaborate with people irrespective of their culture or background (such as sexual orientation, religion, race, nationality, color, gender, and physical and mental ability).
It is important to implement a diversity training program to reduce discrimination in the workplace. Here are the steps you can follow to create efficient diversity training:
- Carry out a detailed assessment to pinpoint important diversity and inclusion obstacles.
- Develop objectives and goals by researching and analyzing the data obtained from the assessment.
- Develop a clear outline of what the program needs to focus on.
- Create the same goals for the employees.
- Find an expert that can oversee the program.
- Ensure all employees take part in the training.
- Instead of producing a short-term solution, focus on creating a long-term plan that is coordinated by experts.
11. Franchise training
Do you run a franchise and want to make your products and processes consistent across your franchised units? Then your employees need franchise training.
It is not easy to maintain consistency, especially if the processes you use and your products change frequently. For your employees to be updated, they need franchise training to get the education they need on-site.
The headquarters can provide all the necessary information and documentation while the branch managers oversee the training.
How Can You Create Different Important Training for Employees?
Online training has become a popular form of employee training in recent years. You can use it for different types of employee training programs.
To get started with employee training, you need to document your work while you’re on the go and also ensure your colleagues do the same. However, this approach will only cater to the basics.
The preferred approach involves organizing this documentation to make employees have access to it and also understand it.
To create different employee training programs, you need to identify your organization’s most pressing needs. These can be any of the following:
- You need to implement orientation and onboarding training if you want to expand and welcome new staff to your company.
- Technical and compliance training should be implemented if you want your product to meet specific standards and market regulations.
- You need to invest in product training if your company has sales representatives and customer support executives.
- Franchise training should be your focus if you have lots of franchised units around the globe. This training will make your processes, products, and services standard throughout where they are.
- Managerial and leadership training is what you need if your company is still growing. This training will prepare your senior employees for leadership tasks.
When Should You Implement Leadership Training?
Since leadership training helps to build on foundational skills, it is ideal to offer the training to staff that will become a manager or employees that recently assumed a leadership role.
If you regularly conduct one-on-one sessions with your team, ask for their career goals.
If any member of your team is interested in a leadership position, meet with other members of the leadership team to know if the person should undergo leadership training at this time.
FAQs
What are the steps in employee training?
Here are the steps that you need to follow in employee training:
- Analyze what you need to accomplish in your training.
- Create a plan that will help you fill your training gaps.
- Invest in the tools you need for the training.
- Develop the content of the training course.
- Implement your training and always measure the results of the training.
What is a training plan?
A training plan refers to a document that helps management and stakeholders to know the details of a training program. An approved training plan helps the project team to use its resources to develop, implement, and execute the proposed training program.
What is a training process?
A training process comprises related activities such as assessment, motivation, design, delivery, and evaluation. Each of the activities builds on the previous ones. They reflect the process through which trainers use to develop, deliver, and evaluate training.
How do you give training?
To carry out successful employee training, here are some techniques that you can use:
- Let the trainees know what you will cover.
- Share the information about the training with them.
- Let the trainees know what they will see before you share a multimedia portion with them.
- Use hands-on training where possible.
- Always test your employees after the training.
Conclusion
In this article, I have discussed the different important training for employees. Each of these training provides different benefits.
To know the training to implement in your organization, you need to consider the training program that best suits your workplace based on the organizational and individual requirements.
When you implement the right training program, you can create opportunities that will empower employees to contribute to the growth and development of the organization.
To ensure the sustainable growth of your business, it is important to invest in employees’ talents. Check out this guide for the different employee training methods that you can use for your workplace training.
Thanks for reading.
