To take your company to the next level, you need to invest in your employees’ continuous professional development. You can do this by seeking out new information, skills, and answers. Continuous learning, when done well, can create a talent for innovation, rethinking, and formulating strategies that will improve your business.
You want your employees to be constantly learning and growing, never content with their past successes. According to a study conducted by SHRM, 49% of employees believe their employers should play a part in their career development, which only highlights the importance of building a culture of continuous learning in your company. A user-friendly, stimulating training program is essential to promoting employee engagement, growth, and overall satisfaction.
You may already have an employee training program in place but have trouble with employee retention. If you want to be successful, your training program must cater to every employee, but also consider how you communicate, train, and get feedback, which can make a big difference in an employee’s growth.
Below, we share some useful strategies for sustaining an impactful training program that will help build a culture of continuous learning within your organization.
Invest in Robust Employee Training Software
Investing in robust employee training software is an essential step toward building a culture of continuous learning. By providing employees with the tools to learn new skills and stay up-to-date with the latest industry trends and company policies, business owners can ensure that their workforce is well-equipped for any challenges that may come their way.
By investing in top-rated training software for teams, you will be able to organize operational knowledge, document SOPs, create scalable processes, define role-based responsibilities, and assign training workflows to ensure that both new and current employees always have access to relevant information.
This is especially useful for remote teams or employees who are geographically scattered. Investing in quality employee training software encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing and helps create a more engaged workforce.
Select the Right Evaluation Model
It’s important to choose the correct evaluation model for your training. This will help you determine what you want to measure and how you are going to measure it.
Understanding how to customize an evaluation model is also key. You will use a different evaluation model for compliance, soft skills, and software training. You will also need to use a different evaluation approach based on the skill and cognition levels of the learners.
Don’t limit the evaluation to a summative assessment. By assessing on-the-job indicators, you can also assess how well your training program helps learners apply their new skills.
Identify Employees Who Can Act as Trainers
You should be able to identify areas where some employees are excelling and areas where other employees need help after your one-on-one interviews. You may find that some employees are better in a certain field than others. If this is the case, you can enlist them as trainers who will help their colleagues improve their skills.
Employees who are struggling with a particular skill will likely not be reassured by an official training program from a company that knows nothing about them. Employees who are already well-versed in a particular topic will be more willing to share their knowledge with others. Make training fun and engaging for employees by making it more than a seminar with a chalkboard outline. The concept of “Lattes and Learning”, or any other activity that involves more than a PowerPoint presentation, will encourage employees to learn from each other in a relaxed environment.
Ask Questions
Even if you implement the most technologically advanced training program, your productivity will suffer without input from existing employees. You should remind employees how important their feedback is to you.
You may find that by conducting interviews and asking workers about the subjects or processes they need assistance with, your current assessment of user training needs could be improved. After all, it’s the employees who are being trained, so their opinions should matter.
Spot-Check Periodically and Demonstrate the Impact and Value to the Organization
Use the model that you chose to collect and analyze data after learners have completed their training to determine the impact of the training on the business. It is then important to demonstrate its value to the company.
You can also tweak or reconfigure your training program based on the results of your analysis. You could also consider adding required components to the existing learning journey based on what the business wants to achieve.
In Closing
Developing a culture that supports learning is an investment that can provide amazing benefits for your organization. It’s essential because it can help you capitalize on your team members’ potential and expand your business. To achieve this, you can consider these practical tips and implement and sustain an impactful training program to maximize the business impact.
