Your employee training plan is one of the most important parts of your onboarding process. Without an excellent training program, you can’t expect new hires to know how to meet their position’s goals.
Consider the perspective of a new employee. Everything is unfamiliar from the moment they step into their new office. They’ll be assigned a desk and given their schedule. Aside from a document with some helpful resources and the hopes that their new coworkers are kind, they are left to their own devices.
How can we expect new hires to succeed without an employee training program?
Give your employees the skills they need to reach their goals and feel confident by building an effective employee training program.
(Recommended reading: Employee Onboarding vs. Orientation)
Identify the Skills Employees Need to Succeed in Their Positions
Before you can build an employee training plan, you need to know what skills each position requires. If you already have employees filling a position, you can ask them to describe their steps to complete daily tasks.
Identifying skills becomes a bit more complicated when you have a new position. You may need to sit down with the department manager to perform a careful review of every task assigned to the position.
Some jobs don’t take a lot of training. Your security guard needs to know how to check IDs, pay attention to when people enter and leave the office, and use tools like video cameras and key card logs. However, a software programmer might need to learn how to use a proprietary system that very few people have used. That could take days of essential training followed by weeks of practice.
After onboarding several employees, you might find that you can perform a skills gap analysis to tailor the employee training plan to each new hire.
Set Specific Learning Objectives for Your Employee Training Plan
More likely than not, your new employees don’t need to know everything about their new positions before they start work. Don’t expect to cram everything into your training program. People will learn some skills on the job.
You do, however, need to establish specific learning objectives for employees to meet before you let them work without a mentor or close supervision. For instance, you might set goals like:
- Respond to customer emails within 5 minutes.
- Type 3 minutes of transcription with 90% accuracy.
- Know how to open, complete, and submit tickets.
Obviously, your employee training plan’s objectives will depend on the job’s responsibilities.
Keep in mind that learning doesn’t end after your training program. You will need to communicate evolving goals to keep employees motivated as they settle into their jobs.
Also, consider letting high-performing employees sign up for additional training seminars. According to one survey, 94% of employees say that they would stay at a company longer when given training that helps them qualify for more advanced positions. Most people don’t want to feel stuck in their jobs. They want careers that will challenge them.
Recommended reading: Performance Management: Best Practices and Examples
Consider That People Have Diverse Learning Preferences
Not everyone learns by reading instructions on a page or watching a video. People have diverse learning preferences. Your employee training program needs to consider those differences to give everyone a chance to learn new skills.
For instance, let’s say you need to train a group of employees to use your office’s VoIP system. You can meet the needs of most people by:
- Talking about how the VoIP system works and what functions they can expect to use on the job.
- Showing the class how to perform job-specific tasks by using a headset to demonstrate the operations.
- Asking your trainees to use their VoIP headsets and follow along as you demonstrate how to use a feature.
- Having your new employees complete a questionnaire about how to perform essential VoIP tasks.
By taking this approach, you have covered the needs of auditory, visual, participatory (kinesthetic), and writing learners.
Request Feedback to Improve Your Employee Training Plan
The first version of your employee training program will only partially reach its goal. It will not fully prepare new hires for their jobs. In fact, the second, third, and fourth editions probably won’t fully prepare them, either.
Your job training program needs to change frequently to keep up with evolving responsibilities, technologies, and learning preferences.
Request feedback from your trainees at least twice. Ask for anonymous feedback at the end of your training program. The information you receive should help you see problems with things like clarity and demonstrations. You might respond by rethinking the way you demonstrate performing a task.
Request another round of feedback two to three weeks after your trainees have taken their positions within the company. At this point, they should have a better idea of whether your training plan prepared them for their jobs. You might learn that you should have covered some topics more than others. You might even discover that some of your information is outdated.
(Recommended reading: Getting More From an Unmotivated Employee)
How America’s Back Office Can Help
Building a reliable job training plan takes a lot of planning and experience. American’s Back Office offers a range of turn-key HR solutions to improve your employee onboarding and training programs.
Reach out to America’s Back Office to schedule a consultation. You can speak with an expert in topics like onboarding new employees, creating workplace safety programs, and employee performance management.
