Recruiters and employers have an important goal: to attract and hire the best workers in their team. They want to give each position to the perfect person; one who can contribute not only to the company’s project, but to the office culture as well. Once they hire those people, they have to keep them motivated through opportunities for career progress. That’s where corporate training comes in.
How do you incorporate effective corporate training that would lead your employees to professional growth, but wouldn’t inspire them to look for jobs in other companies?
We’ll suggest 10 best corporate training strategies that work.
- Add Gamification to the Training Process
You surely have millennials in your team, right? That’s the generation of tech progress. They grew up playing games. Now they have serious jobs, but that doesn’t mean they don’t like games any longer.
Check out El Design – a service that offers gamification solutions for product training, induction and onboarding, social collaboration, compliance, and more.
- Make Corporate Training Easy
The last thing you need is to start training your employees to master a technique they know nothing of. If, for example, you hire a corporate trainer to introduce the neuro-linguistic programming concept to people who are completely new to it and you give them only a day for the training, you’ll end up with a confused team. They will learn few disconnected things they will never implement in their work.
You want to push your team to progress step-by-step. You don’t want them to be overwhelmed by the training.
- Provide Relevant Training
Your workers won’t have patience to learn useless. If, for example, you want them to master the skill of blogging, you have to explain how it will be relevant to their progress. Otherwise, they will consider the training irrelevant and boring.
- Evaluate the Results of the Training
How do you know your workers are happy with the training you deliver? You simply ask. They can complete an anonymous questionnaire, telling you about the things they liked and didn’t like about the training they just went through. Ask them what they would like to see improved. Then, use that feedback to provide better training in future.
- Use the Spaced Repetition Technique to Help Them Remember
What happens after you provide one-time training for a particular skill, such as blogging for example? You might get them interested, but if you serve too much information in a single day, they will soon forget everything they heard. It’s important to engage them in spaced repetition.
You will offer the training program over a prolonged period of time. You’ll serve small bits of information, which the employees will repeat before getting the new part of the training.
- Invite Them to Give Presentations
Some corporate trainers are used to teach by talking. However, there’s a more effective approach: encourage the learners to do the talking. Of course, the trainer will give them initial guidelines, and then they will trigger lively discussions. They can even inspire the learners to create and present their own projects, based on the research they conduct.
- Set Clear Expectations
You don’t provide the training just because you want to make your employees happy. You have your own expectations, which are usually related to the goal of business growth. You want more competent, inspired workers who will use the skills they learn to make the organization better.
You need to convey your expectations throughout the training process. They should understand that the purpose of this training is connected not only to their own professional growth, but to the company’s strategic goals as well.
- Incorporate eLearning
Reward the employee of the month with an online course to their choice, and pay for the certificate. Ask them to choose a course relevant to their career goals. However, the course should also be relevant to your industry. Then, ask them to present what they’ve learned and give them a bonus for the effort.
Pay attention to the skills your employees develop through this program. Think how they can use them in their daily tasks. Of course, you don’t want to force anyone into online learning. Explain that this is a voluntary activity, which is beneficial for the ones who accept it.
- Stay Flexible
You’re aware of the fact that each worker has unique strengths and weaknesses, right? Not all of your employees have the same skills and interest in technology, for example. To get the most out of corporate training, you have to be flexible enough to fit everyone’s skills in a single program.
You want to emphasize their strengths and inspire them to work on the weaknesses. If someone is not doing as well as the others, you don’t want to make them feel bad. You need to inspire them to reach their full potential.
- Don’t Forget the Follow-Up
Your work with corporate training isn’t finished when a program ends. You have to think about follow-ups. If you provide certificates for the program, plan a recertification session in a year or two. In the meantime, throw in short training sessions to remind the employees of the things they learned.
All corporate trainers have their own approach to the process. However, the 10 tips we gave above are universal. They can make your training sessions much more effective!
Author bio:
Chris Richardson is a journalist and editor at EssayGeeks.co.uk. He is fond of traveling, sports, and playing the guitar. Chris finds his inspiration in writing. Meet him on on Facebook and Google+.
