Simple Ways to Ensure Your Corporate Training Sticks

Thanks to an increasing skill gap, lack of interest in training, and employee turnover due to lack of proper training, businesses are losing $13,500 annually for every employee that gets trained.

This number does not look surprising considering only 12% of learners apply the skills they obtain during training to their day-to-day tasks.

As corporate training becomes an unspoken norm in the business landscape, there is a need for businesses to treat it as a business enabler instead of a requirement that needs to be fulfilled.

Providing training to employees is not the challenge; providing effective training to employees is.

If you, too, are struggling with this challenge, read on to discover simple ways to improve the effectiveness of your corporate training:

Invest in Custom Training Solutions

The training needs of every organization are different. To address these needs, you need tailor-made solutions designed for your business. The two most “purchased” corporate training solutions are learning management systems and training content. These tools also have the maximum influence over the experience of your training program.

Let’s talk about both in a bit more detail:

• Customizing a learning management system (LMS) may seem like an expensive undertaking, but thankfully, LMS vendors realize the importance of personalized products. In other words, there are a number of industry-focused LMS available to choose from, in almost every industry niche. While these LMS contain most of the features you may require, many offer their clients the freedom to add custom functionalities to suit their unique needs.
• Once again, it is a known fact that developing custom training content is an expensive and time-consuming task. While some of the expenses can be mitigated by reusing parts of your existing training material, there is still a lot of investment required to develop high-quality custom content. Custom eLearning solutions offer content creation that is unique to your requirements and is better placed for users to gain value from.

It is high time businesses come to the realization that a personalized approach to training is an absolute necessity and start reaping the benefits of a custom learning experience for their employees.

Communicate benefits of training

Often, employees are not interested in training because they don’t see its relevance. As a result, disinterested employees complete the training for the sake of it, extracting virtually no benefits.

The trick to overcoming this hurdle is to clearly and consistently communicate the benefits of your training program to your employees. These include both, the benefits that your organization will draw, and the benefits that your employees can expect to take their careers to the next level.

Foster a culture of continuous learning

Most organizations take an “event” based approach to learning with a definitive end objective, after achieving which, training will come to an end.

While having clear goals is highly recommended, training shouldn’t “end” after achieving said goal. Instead, training should be treated as an ongoing process.

There are a number of ways to facilitate this behavior. For starters, you can promote a social learning culture by letting employees from different departments, that are working on the same project, interact with each other.

There are also processes like succession planning and leadership development that can contribute to the cause of continuous learning.

Conclusion

A personalized approach to training, combined with a transparent training infrastructure that rewards those who want to learn is the best way to improve the effectiveness of your training program. Sure, doing so requires some significant changes to your current training approach, but it is a small price to pay for the high returns associated with effective corporate training.