How To Develop A Training Program For Employees

Competitive advantage is all about adaptability in today’s super dynamic business context. As tech evolves and market opportunities change with consumer demands, companies that develop their people are the ones that stay ahead of the curve.

If you’re in charge of training, motivating, onboarding, or upskilling your teams, this guide takes a closer look at how you can develop an online training program for employees.

Before getting started, why not sign up for Quenza’s $1, 30-day trial? Quenza’s digital toolkit contains all you need to design, build, and implement online employee training programs easily and efficiently, giving you a powerful way to boost performance and job satisfaction starting now.

How To Develop A Training Program For Employees

A cleverly designed employee training program gives teammates development opportunities and the guidance they need to apply their strengths more strategically for professional success. But that’s not all–as they gain new skills, refresh old ones, and acquire new knowledge, they’re also advancing your firm’s competitive advantage by keeping you at peak performance.

We’ll consider the rationale behind creating a training program and show you how to bring it to life.

Setting up a training program can have a host of mutual benefits for organizations and employees.

5 Benefits of Setting Up A Training Program

Setting up a training program can have a host of mutual benefits for organizations and employees. The following list includes a few examples, according to industry research:[1][2]

1. Training initiatives can directly improve individual, collective, and organizational performance, according to 90% of employee responses in an International Journal of Business and Management Research study
2. They can also lead to improved productivity, through enhanced confidence, task management, and engagement
3. Training can improve staff retention rates, saving organizations from turnover costs
4. They’re beneficial for organizational culture, encouraging learning, continuous improvement, and morale
5. Training programs are empowering for staff, giving them hard and soft skills that encourage more autonomy and independence.

With strategic, cultural, and individual benefits for organizations across a range of sectors, well-developed employee training programs are among the most important investments organizations can make in their continued success.

So what do they look like, what do they teach, and how do can you design one?

Types of Training Programs: A List and Examples

To be effective, training programs should be relevant to a company’s sector and strategic goals. There is a huge range of different training programs out there, but here are a few of the most popular types.[3][4]

1. Orientation and induction training programs for new employees help to onboard staff and impart relevant knowledge for their role
2. Technical skills training initiatives teach or strengthen specific ‘hard skills,’ e.g. financial analysis, welding, or graphic design
3. Soft skills training helps employees cultivate social or interpersonal competencies such as communication, decision-making, leadership, or emotional intelligence
4. Refresher training programs aim to update an employees’ existing technical or soft skills
5. Safety training focuses on how employees can protect themselves and others on the job, e.g. while operating dangerous equipment or handling hazardous chemicals
6. Product or service training helps co-workers gain knowledge of a company’s value offer, e.g. understanding product features, helping customers with aftercare or returns.

Planning and Designing Your Program: 6 Steps

There are two elements to creating an effective program:

• Plan relevant, valuable content that will benefit your staff and organization, and
• Organize your material into an engaging, motivational solution.

  

Each and every program should serve a strategic purpose; there’s no point in designing a course without first setting some goals. When it comes to road-mapping the knowledge you hope to share, the career experts at Indeed.com suggest the following steps:[5]

1. Assess training needs. Identify goals that align with business and employee needs, then determine what actions are necessary for those goals to be achieved. What should they be able to do as a result of your intervention?
2. Design for your audience. A program should be designed for the experienced, goal-oriented, and task-oriented adults that you’re hoping to train. Keep your audience’s needs, strengths, and drivers in mind as you develop content.
3. Establish learning objectives. These will be more specific than the goals you developed from your assessment; think of them as SMART sub-goals for each stage of your program.
4. Design and develop training materials. Plan and create a logical flow of ‘building block’ resources that will constitute your training program (more on this in the next section!)
5. Implement your program. Set clear employee expectations about your program goals, what they should expect, and how you’ll help them measure their learning at the end of the intervention.
6. Evaluate the success of your program. This can involve collecting feedback, evaluating performance metrics, or any other approach that helps you determine whether you have met your goals.

Samples and Examples of Effective Programs

Each and every program should serve a strategic purpose; there’s no point in designing a course without first setting some goals.

As we’ve seen, the first step to creating your own program is to decide on the kind of training that’s most aligned with your company’s goals.

From here, it will become a little easier to refine your ambitions down into bite-sized learning objectives. The following two examples may help.

Creating an Induction Training Program for New Employees

A program with the overarching goal of introducing new employees into a company might cover:

• Your vision, mission, and values
• Your culture and organizational policies
• How your business is structured
• Key functions of your department, team, or division
• Meet-and-greet with teammates
• Onboarding paperwork and administrative logins

Designing a Communications Skills Training Program for Teams

A sample Communications Skills Training Program might cover:

• Introduction to a communication style framework
• The importance of adaptive communication
• Self-awareness building exercises on communicative strengths and weaknesses
• Soft skills training to develop important techniques and approaches for an employee’s role.

A Look At Creating An Online Training Program

The most effective learning experience to create for your team, department, or company is going to be determined by what sector you’re operating in, the skills/knowledge you hope to share, and your employees’ learning preferences.

Fundamentally, however, most companies have three options: online training, in-person training, or blended training – a hybrid of both.

Programs where the bulk of learning takes place online are the most popular for a few reasons:

• They’re scalable (you can add on learning modules or invite participants flexibly)
• They’re easy to update and re-use as goals, tech, or relevant knowledge changes
• They’re cost-effective to design and implement, and
• They’re far more accessible and convenient than in-person training.

If an online training program is what you’re aiming for, the good news is that you can easily create an entire solution or suite of solutions with one single software system like Quenza.

How To Use Quenza For Your Program

As an experienced team leader, manager, or executive, setting strategic development goals and measuring performance probably fall well within your skillset.

But how can you develop a training program for employees logistically with a digital program like Quenza?

Once you’ve determined your training needs and learning objectives, Quenza’s toolkit helps you design, build, and implement your program in a few simple steps:

1. Design your training program materials using Quenza’s Activity Builder

Using a blank template as we’ve done below, it’s easy to create the building blocks of an online training program:

You can easily create from-scratch activities, assessments, worksheets, lessons, and more from drag-and-drop tools in Quenza’s Activity Builder, including custom multimedia uploads such as videos, images, and audio files.

2. Organize your content using Quenza’s Pathway Tools

Then it’s simply a matter of putting it all together using Quenza’s Pathway tools:

3. Implementing Your Program with Quenza: An Example

When you’ve finished designing and building your training program, sharing it with your employees is as straightforward as clicking ‘Send’:

Not only will your colleagues receive their training programs on a schedule that you determine, but you’ll also be able to track their progress, compliance, and engagement automatically using Quenza.

How? Let’s take a look at Quenza’s tools and unique features.

8 Templates and Tools Included In Quenza

Quenza’s toolkit is specially developed for easy program development, whether you’re creating motivational training programs, coaching solutions, or e-courses for your audience. In addition to the Activity builder and Pathway tools, and among other features, your all-in-one platform includes:

1. An Expansion Library of customizable exercise, assessment, reflection, and lesson templates for training, such as the VIA Classification of Character Strengths and Virtues
2. Live results and performance tracking
3. Group and private chat
4. A group coaching feature for training cr0ss-functional or globally dispersed teams, departments, or functions as a cohort
5. Private and secure file-sharing
6. HIPAA-compliant note-taking features
7. Client or learner engagement tools such as task reminders and push notifications, and
8. A white label feature for creating branded training materials.

Final Thoughts

Training programs, like so many other aspects of the way we work, are increasingly being digitalized. As companies become more global and the pace of change picks up, we can expect a lot more online training in the future.

What organizational goals are you hoping to achieve with your program, and how will you engage your employees with your learning experience? Let us know with a comment.

Get your training program started today with unlimited 30-day access to Quenza’s professional toolkit.

Quenza makes it easy to craft interactive, engaging modules, exercises, assessments, and more, giving you everything you need to develop your employees and boost your competitive advantage.

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