Training your employees is — dare we say — one of the most strategic investments a business can ever make. And yet, 59% of employees report never had workplace training, even though “company training programs yield 218% higher income per employee” than those without formalized training, as revealed by the Association for Talent Development (ATD).
To make employee training programs straightforward and possible for every company, and to benefit of every new hire, we made 7 steps to building an employee training program that delivers the return on investment you need to justify the
LinkedIn found that skills sets for jobs have changed by around 25% since 2015. By 2027, this number is expected to double. So it’s become more essential than ever to develop an employee training program that empowers employees and businesses alike.
Now that you’re sold on the importance of having an employee training program, this article will show you how to implement one in the best way for your new hires, existing teams, and your bottom line.
Read on to understand the 7 essential steps to create a staff training program that not only meets your company’s specific needs but also empowers your employees to thrive in their roles.
How can you build an employee training program?
While every training program will look different, there are fundamental basics to creating a successful plan for new hires and for professional development.
Below is a new employee training program template to follow that you can tick off as you go:
1. Conduct an assessment
Before you start working on your training program, understand:
- Where does your business need to go?
- Where [figuratively] are your employees currently?
Start by assessing your current approach, to see what’s working and should be kept, as well as looking for areas of opportunity.
Start by asking several levels in the hierarchy, from C-suite to customer-facing to operations, the following questions in an off-the-record interview:
- Where in our business is there low productivity?
- What are the essential skills you need, and your team needs for the next year?
- Are there any noticeable skill gaps in the people you work with directly, even if in other teams?
- Are these gaps seen only in new hires or in employees with long tenures, too?
The second part of your assessment can include an anonymous survey. After all, you can’t create a program that boosts productivity levels if you don’t know what’s hindering them!
Ask all employees:
- What skills do you currently use every day?
- What skills are you missing that could help you be more productive at your job?
- What skills are you missing that could help you get a promotion, if desired?
- What skills are you currently working on outside of our formal employee training?
Not only can this step in the new employee training program template help you create your training program, it can help you customize it to your employees’ needs and make them feel included in the process—essential for buy-in when the training courses are rolled out—so no part of your training development efforts is wasted.
2. Set goals and get buy in
You must take the time to align your training and business goals. Without this element, getting funding and time allocation signed off by superiors will rely on sheer charisma… Showing up with the numbers (from your assessment and the stats at the beginning of this article) will make it easier for you to “sell” the idea to all stakeholders.
When persuading stakeholders to allocate time and budget to employee training program goals, consider things like;
- How will employee performance improve after the program?
- How will the program improve employee retention?
- How will ROI be measured?
Nail down your company’s biggest desirable metric: is it brand differentiation, ROI, or customer perception perhaps? The benefits of employee training even stretch to increasing customer satisfaction and ease of offboarding. The benefits are numerous, so you must speak to those that will most resonate with those deciding on your funding.
3. Determine the best training method for your employees
Once you know where your teams stand and have stakeholder buy-in to revamp your training and development programs for employees, it’s time to set your goals.
At the end of each training program, what goal are you trying to accomplish that impacts employees and your business? Increased productivity? Happier customers? You’ll always know what you expect from this program if you write down your goals.
Notice how we stated “each training program”? That’s because, if your employees have varying knowledge and skill needs, you should consider creating multiple learner personas or tackling them in separate training and development programs for employees.
Determining the right type(s) of staff training program for each team member is all about understanding what skills your team members need to develop and what will work best given their specific needs. You can determine this by developing a training matrix that will ensure that you’re providing team members with training that provides them and the business with growth.
Once you’ve discovered the perfect type of training, you can decide which training should be delivered remotely (online), which needs to be in-person training and when a combination is best. Pro tip: Whether to host virtual vs. in-person training should be decided by your learners’ preferences, not the materials.
Remember, however, that no matter how effective the training is, learners, on average, will forget 50% of what they learned within an hour. So ensure you have a strategy and the right tools to help learners access and retain the knowledge.
4. Put logistics in place
By now, you will have documented everything you and your employees need for this program to succeed. It’s time to get the logistical parts in order.
To get the creative juices flowing, consider these variations on logistical needs:
- For an instructor-led program, you’ll need to hire an expert speaker.
- If your training program is for new employee onboarding, your plan might include video lessons and simulations.
- For training and development programs for employees targeting client-facing employees, you may need to build in role-plays.
- When you train seasoned employees, their tolerance for deep-dive content might be greater than those who are just starting their journey with you.
Regardless of how your program looks, your logistics plan will need to answer:
- ✅ What’s the goal?
- ✅ Who is this for?
- ✅ What topics will be covered, i.e. what will they learn?
- ✅ How will training be delivered?
- ✅ Who will create the content?
- ✅ What’s the timeline?
- ✅ What resources will we need?
- ✅ How will we measure results?
- ✅ What’s our budget?
- ✅ How will we collect feedback on the program?
With employee training software like Whale, you can deliver an employee training program that satisfies every stakeholder and trainee.
5. Invest in the necessary training resources and content
Now you’re wondering what resources are you going to need to develop an effective employee training program.
The intricacies of this will depend on what type of training you aim to deliver but irrespective of whether you send your team members on external training, deliver it in-house, or operate a blend, it’s worth beginning to source:
- An employee onboarding and training tool.
- One person on each team who’s responsible for training being allocated to their subordinates.
- A dedicated team to collect feedback and implement it.
- Company goals and short-term priorities to which you can align.
In terms of resources to source down the line, you’ll need to consider the budget, who will impart the content, your timeline, and the time each trainee will dedicate to taking your training and development programs for employees.
6. Create memorable content
With your high-level work training plan in hand, it’s time to build the training content that trainees remember. While Edgar Dale’s “we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see…” is mostly hyperbole, there’s truth in the science that “the average learner forgets 70% of what they learned within 24 hours and forget 90% of what they learned in a week if they don’t make an effort to retain it.” The psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus coined the Forgetting Curve so that we latter-day trainers can do a better job of transmitting information to our learners.
We can all agree there’s no point curating immensely informative content if trainees only retain 10% of your program, and we should go beyond the way we present information for maximum retention, we should also consider how little you should present, for memorability.
Choose a Minimum Viable Learning that trainees should come away from a session with. Adam Spacth, the No-Boring Trainer encourages us to ask ourselves: “What are the key, fundamental, essential, mission-critical bits people need to know to meet the session objective?” Spacht instructs us to resist the urge to cram in anything else.
Lastly, the easiest part of creating memorable content that team members love: Use multimedia—engaging images, videos, jokes when appropriate, emojis 😜 and real-life stories to make your training materials engaging.
Ideally, you should consolidate all this training material in a centralized location for effortless access, both during and after the training sessions. As we previously mentioned, information retention often hinges on trainees being able to see things more than once.
7. Deliver, measure, and update training
Drum roll, please 🥁 — it’s time to put your program into action!
You can create training flows to show trainees how they’re advancing through the courses, use quizzes to assess the results, and most importantly, measure to see how the plan is delivering on your business goals.
Measuring your training’s effectiveness might seem like a no-brainer, but most companies don’t do it. Only about 50% of companies bother tracking what their employees have to say about the training and even fewer look into how much the training truly impacted productivity.
So here’s how to gather feedback for improvement of training and development programs for employees:
- Talk to people managers.
See if they noticed any short- or long-term improvements in their team. If the results were only short-term, you might need to change your program to fight the forgetting curve, which is typical in employee training.
- Get feedback from employees.
Did they find it engaging? Has it added value in their role? What could be done better? Measuring your employee training programs helps ensure you maximize your program’s chance of success.
- Repeat, several weeks later.
This is the golden tip: Carry out surveys and interviews recently after the training is imparted, then do the same weeks later. By that point, you’ll be able to better gauge:
- What the employees retained
- How much of the training was implementable
- Remaining gaps in their knowledge
- Information that seemed useful but was not applied in practice.
Start measuring the impact of your employee training programs after implementing this new employee training program template and rocket your brand straight into the top 50% of companies who care about professional growth.
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9 Types of employee training programs
You can find the best employee training program for your team by Venn-diagramming your team’s needs with those of the business. Ideally, you’ll already have defined this in your product training matrix. Here are the top 9 that Whale believes every team should keep in their back pocket:
1. Onboarding training
Think back to your first day at a new job—it can be overwhelming.
Is your onboarding training designed to get a new hire fully up to speed and ready to start their new role in confidence?
Onboarding training is all about helping new hires get comfortable with the company culture, policies, and their specific roles.
At the bare minimum, onboarding should include a warm welcome, a buddy system to get their questions answered, and a friendly guidebook.
2. Orientation training
Orientation training can be similar to onboarding training; however, it’s generally more practical and shorter in duration.
Some companies combine both when onboarding new hires so that orientation training provides basic organizational information that new hires need and can include:
- Safety training
- Meeting schedules
- The organization chart
- Use guides on workplace tools, systems, and supplies
- Who to ask for help
- How to request equipment and software
And yes, orientation must include where the coffee machine is.
3. Compliance training
You don’t want to get caught up in a legal or regulatory bind just because your team skipped compliance training. Compliance training ensures your team knows the rules and regulations they must follow, and also gives employees confidence in your company’s value system.
For legal reasons, it’s especially crucial in industries like finance and healthcare, where there’s no room for error.
Examples include;
- Diversity training
- Paid-time off policies
- Anti-harassment policies
- Corruption awareness
4. Soft skills training
Ever had a miscommunication at work? Soft skills training usually covers essential interpersonal skills like communication, teamwork, and problem-solving to avoid miscommunications and hurt feelings. But training ought to go much further, because soft skills impact the bottom line.
Patrick Mullane reported that employers now rank soft skills higher than technical skills when hiring new employees, following Gallup and Amazon Web Services research.
As you plan your employee training programs, scope out budget to improve the following skills—and not only among leadership—across the board:
- Adaptability
- Conflict resolution
- Teamwork
- Problem-solving
- Time management
- Active listening
- Creativity
- Organization
- Critical thinking
- Dependability
- Integrity
- Nonverbal communication
- Work ethic
- Negotiation
- Patience
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Empathy
- Flexibility
- Persistence
Which of these soft, significant skills does your team need most urgently?
5. Technical training
Technical training provides employees with the skills needed to perform specific tasks or to use particular technologies. This can include software training, machinery operation, and other job-specific technical skills such as legal training, SEO, or any other specific skill.
6. Product training
If your team is selling or supporting your products, they need to know them inside and out. Product training helps them understand all the features and benefits so they can better assist your customers. It’s like turning them into product experts.
7. Leadership training
Got future leaders in your ranks? You won’t know unless you develop them.
Leadership training is designed to develop the skills needed for managerial and executive roles. It covers everything from strategic planning to team management, preparing them for bigger responsibilities.
Leadership training should begin with mastering the soft skills cited in the last section, and build on these by discovering each leader’s zone of genius. The logic behind leaning into your superpowers, rather than filling the gaps in your weaker soft skills, is that you can only become mediocre in your lesser soft skills, but you might become outstanding in skills that are already strengths.
Training in groups can reveal the zones of genius of each leader. Who knows, perhaps you have a genius in integrity or a master of flexibility in your ranks, who could, in turn, deliver more soft skill training to the rest of the company!
8. Ongoing training
Ongoing employee training is continuous training that is designed to ensure that employees stay up-to-date and empowered with the skills they need to perform at their best.
9. Transitional training
Transitional training is perhaps the most interesting and personalizable, it’s designed to help team members transition from one role to another.
This training assists with both adopting new technical skills as well as adopting a new way of working. While you might not create a formal staff training program for every transition within your organization, there should be:
- One employee training program for recurring moves, from customer service into corporate roles for example.
- A delegate trainer who will take responsibility for preparing the transitioning employee when there is no need for a mass training program.
We often need support to transition to a different role or a different part of the business. These people should be set up for success as much as any new hire.
How do employee training programs relate to business performance?
Training isn’t just about ticking a box – it has a real impact on business performance. According to the ATD, companies with comprehensive training programs see a 24% higher profit margin.
To see a noticeable impact from your training and development programs for employees, make sure you;
1. Calculate Return on Investment (ROI)
Training costs money, but it’s an investment. Calculate the ROI by comparing training costs to benefits like increased productivity and reduced turnover. Look at metrics like sales, error rates, and customer satisfaction.
2. Align training with business goals
Make sure your employee training programs align with your company’s strategic objectives. This shows how training contributes to achieving those goals and makes it easier to justify the investment.
3. Leverage technology
Use technology to deliver training efficiently and cost-effectively. Learning platforms like Whale, virtual classrooms, and mobile training apps offer flexible learning options and can save money in the long run.
4. Encourage a culture of continuous learning
Create a culture that values continuous learning and even rewards “not knowing” something right now. Encourage employees to take ownership of their professional growth and provide opportunities for ongoing education and skill development. This keeps everyone engaged and constantly improving.
What are the best examples of employee training programs?
1. McDonald's Hamburger University
Burgers are good for more than our hunger! McDonald’s Hamburger University trains employees in restaurant management and operations. With campuses worldwide, it offers a blend of classroom instruction and hands-on experience. It’s a gold standard in comprehensive training and how to systemize training.
2. Google's Googler-to-Googler Program
Google’s Googler-to-Googler (g2g) program is a peer-to-peer training initiative. Employees teach and learn from each other on a wide range of topics, fostering a culture of continuous learning, which is why it’s a win-win for everyone involved.
3 common mistakes to avoid when building employee training programs
If you’re going to go to the effort of investing your time, that of several other people in the organization, and plenty of budget allocation into revamping your training and development programs for employees, watch out for these common mistakes.
1. Not documenting training processes
Do you know what’s worse than documenting a staff training program from scratch? Needing to document the same material and processes again because you didn’t store that information somewhere.
Not our definition of a good time. 😩
Not only can repeating a process feel tedious, it takes valuable time away from building and adding to your programs. Instead, use an employee training tool like Whale that helps you document your processes and training material in one place.
2. Choosing methods you’d enjoy, not your team
There isn’t a hard and fast rule for the training methods you should choose. However, choosing a method that doesn’t align with your team’s learning style and their departmental goals can hurt your program’s success rate.
Take some time to go over the information you gathered to decide which method can give you a great ROI.
3. Cramming in information
As touched on earlier in this article, a common issue businesses face is throwing everything into a training program. It can be tempting to want to fix the areas your teams aren’t strong in all at once. But it can easily backfire.
Many employee training programs suffer from low course completion rates because the courses are overly lengthy. It can be challenging for employees to dedicate an hour or more of their day to training sessions, and attention spans are even slimmer than average on busy work days.
One effective solution to address this issue is microlearning, which offers concise learning experiences that require no more than 10 minutes to finish. These microlearning modules present information in smaller, easily digestible portions, contrasting with conventional e-learning courses that can take hours or even days to complete.
Research has demonstrated that microlearning results in higher
knowledge retention compared to traditional e-learning methods.
💡 P.S. You can do this easily on Whale using automated training flows.
Bottom line? Success is in the eye of the… Trainee.
While success may be in the eye of the beholder, the efficacy of training sessions should be assessed by the trainees more than those delivering the training. This requires us all to leave our egos aside!
Training also has tangible business benefits, which is why, by following our step-by-step guide on building your staff training program and watching out for those common mistakes, you’ll be reaping the benefits in no time!
Ready to start training your employees but need somewhere to house all your training documents? Then try Whale for free today — our tool lets you organize your training documents and smoothly train your team so that the trainees, as much as the trainers, are thrilled with the outcome.
FAQs about employee training programs
What’s the best way to measure the effectiveness of a training program?
It’s best to measure training effectiveness through a mix of assessments, feedback surveys, and performance metrics. Look at KPIs like productivity, error rates, and retention to see how well the training is working.
Can small businesses afford comprehensive training programs?
Absolutely! Small businesses can use cost-effective solutions like online learning platforms and peer-to-peer training to scale their learning. Investing in training pays off in the long run with a more skilled and motivated workforce.
How should you structure a training session?
An effective training session can be structured in four parts:
1. Outline objectives, set expectations, and engage participants with an icebreaker.
2. Deliver content using diverse methods (lectures, demos, etc.), ensuring clarity and engagement.
3. Incorporate group discussions, hands-on exercises, or role-playing to reinforce learning.
4. Summarize key points, address questions, and provide resources for further learning.
Finally, always gather feedback to refine future sessions.
How do you create an effective training program for employees?
To build an effective staff training program for employees, start by identifying their training needs. Then, set clear objectives, develop engaging content, and choose the right delivery method. Implement the program with practical exercises and monitor progress. Regularly evaluate and refine the training based on feedback.
What are the 6 steps in developing a training program?
Developing a staff training program involves six key steps:
- Analyze the training needs by identifying skill gaps including future gaps as the indusrtry evolves.
- Define specific learning objectives that align with your business goals.
- Design the course structure and materials to suit the team’s needs.
- Develop engaging content, including activities and assessments.
- Implement the training, ensuring it aligns with organizational goals.
- Evaluate the program’s effectiveness through feedback and performance metrics, allowing for continuous improvement and adjustments as necessary.
What should a training program include?
A comprehensive employee training program should include:
1. Clear objectives
Define what employees will learn and achieve.
2. Content and materials
Create relevant, engaging content with various media and resources.
3. Delivery methods
Choose appropriate formats like e-learning, workshops, or blended learning.
4. Assessments
Implement quizzes, practical tests, or projects to evaluate understanding.
5. Support
Provide ongoing resources, mentorship, and feedback mechanisms to ensure continuous learning and development.
Finally, always gather feedback to refine future sessions.
