Ensuring your employees have the proper training strategies is essential for your organisation's long term success. In addition, 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if their company invested in their learning.
Training strategies allow organisations to distribute engaging and effective knowledge. If implemented correctly, it yields productive results and create a great company culture where employees won’t want to leave.
In this article, we will look at what a training strategy is, the benefits and exactly how to implement one correctly. Let’s dive in:
A training strategy is a plan on how you educate your workforce. It shows how training is implemented, when and through what medium. A plan is normally formulated with a long term training goal in mind. This could be upskilling your workforce or teaching employees new skills.
A training plan is crucial for making sure your organisation has the skills that it needs. While it serves existing employees, it also covers onboarding training for new hires.
Training strategies are widely adopted across all sizes of organisations. So what are its benefits if formulated correctly? Let's have a look at 6 benefits below:
Your employees' skill sets are vital to your organisation's success. Making sure they have the relevant training and development adds substantial value. It enables employees to fit into various roles and develops their already existing skills. Likewise, making their jobs easier and more rewarding.
Staff completing their work is one thing, but doing it efficiently is another. Having effective training strategies deployed increases focus and organisation. Once a strategy has been conveyed, your workforce can clearly understand their role, focus on the organisation's objective and deliver highly effective results.
Employees are more confident when they know how to do a job correctly. Without the right training, they can easily lose focus, work slowly or make mistakes. Training programs allow employees to know what is expected of them.
Understanding the strategy enables employees to feel more confident in their workleading to higher productivity within your role.
94% of employees say that they would stay at an organisation longer if they had the correct training to help them develop their career. Hiring can be a time consuming and costly process. It’s a lot cheaper to retain an employee than hire a new one.
Providing tailored training through a clear strategy shows employees that you value them and their role. It can also help them feel more secure and generally happier.
Training strategies promote a clear path for employee promotions within your organisation. This is preferred not only by motivated employees seeking promotion but also by employers.
Employees who are already familiar with your organisation, understand what is expected and the values they have to emulate. A common component of a training strategy is management training. This prepares lower or mid-level employees for supervisor or manager postions.
Delivering a clear and consistent message to all new hires is vital. A new hire policy within a training strategy provides exactly that. It helps them know exactly how and what they need to do. Likewise this enables new hires to get used to their new position quicker. Providing good onboarding training means new starts can get a solid foundation to help be successful in their new role.
We now know the benefits of developing an effective employee training program and strategy. Now to the important part, what are the steps to create one? All organisations are slightly different, but these broad rules apply to all sizes. Let's take a closer look:
The first step is identifying who needs training, when they need it and through what medium of delivery. This creates a tailored training strategy that is hyper-relevant to your organisation and its employees. You can ascertain which training needs to be delivered by surveying employees and conducting upper management training assessment meetings.
Once you have the feedback, you can formulate your training strategies keeping in mind the overall organisation's long term goals.
Understanding your employee's skill level will help you know what training is needed within your strategy. You can do this by observation, meetings with department heads and performance reviews.
In case employee skill level doesn’t meet your expectations, you have to create and allocate training to fill that gap in knowledge. It could be the case that it's easily fixed, or you might have to allocate extensive training for broader issues.
After you understand what training is needed, the next step is to look at your current resources. Knowing what you have allows you to plan how to use them. At this point, you might realise that you don’t have everything you need. In this case, you’ll have to find effective training solutions to fill those gaps.
This can be in-class learning, e Learning, mentorship and many other formats.
Prioritising what training needs to be allocated first should be the next step. When doing this, have your long-term training strategy goal in mind. What learning objectives and business goals need to be met? Focus on the skills that are most important to reach your organisations goals and deliver these first.
In some circumstances, your priority choice may be based on available resources. You might face budgeting or staffing constraints which could change the priority when planning.
Setting a budget will clearly highlight what can be completed within your training and development programs.This will include what training forms and delivery methods you can be used within the budget. As you have read so far, training is an integral component of the future success of an organisation. Training budgets need to reflect the importance of this.
Once all the previous steps are complete it’s time to draft your plan. Included in each level of this will be:
It’s worth getting department heads involved in the drafting process to ensure all bases are covered.
You need to plan who is going to deliver the training. There might be the relevant skills to do so already within your organisation. Alternatively you may have to look externally to find suitable talent. e Learning is an excellent solution for this as it provides you with a vast amount of online training relating to your business with easy delivery.
Now you are ready to launch your training plan. Getting buy-in from senior management is essential to ensure a high uptake in the training strategy. Once you have started delivering, the work doesn’t stop there.
You have to constantly analyse competitors, changing market conditions, and new technologies. On top of this, make sure your employee experience is great, you can do this by tracking the back end data to see user satisfaction.
myAko is the streamlined and powerful learning & development (LMS) system. Its a comprehensive solution on how to create, manage and deliver effective training. Delivering effective training programs is made easy with authoring tools and can collate user data with automated employee feedback questionnaires.
Creating tailored learning pathways is one way to make a training strategy great. myAko delivers precisely that, allowing every user to receive training relevant to their needs and learning style.
Extensive data capabilities mean you can track in real-time how your training strategy is being received and make tweaks where needed. The user-friendly interface allows you to change and customise most of the intuitive system effortlessly.
You will save costs of hiring training facilitators by untilising over 2000 in-depth and comprehensive courses and training. Employees can take these anywhere, at any time, with the myAko app.
Get in touch with the myAko team here today to get hands-on with this unrivaled SaaS solution.
One of the team is ready to show you how everything works and answer any questions you might have!
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