According to Gartner, 70 percent of the workers feel that they are not capable enough or have the right skills to do their jobs effectively. If you do not want your workforce to be in this category, you must opt for a comprehensive training program.
Investing in resources for employee training and development is the best decision to have a quality workforce. With a comprehensive training manual, employees get accustomed to your business culture even with diverse backgrounds and work experiences.
What Does Comprehensive Training Mean?
Comprehensive training meaning is to include multiple separate curriculums where every curriculum comprises different classes. For instance, you can design a comprehensive training program that offers a single curriculum for project managers.
Likewise, different curriculums are for field superintendents, existing supervisors, newly hired supervisors, experienced craft staff, or new craft staff.
Investing in a professionally developed comprehensive training program allows your business to enjoy excellent benefits, which include:
- Increase in employee job satisfaction
- Increased employee engagement rates
- Improvement in efficiency and productivity
- Increased employee retention rates
- Improved coaching culture
It also covers the organization's policies and practices that help the workforce to know necessary elements such as discrimination and safety laws.
Apart from the benefits mentioned above, allocating time and resources to train your staff improves your organization's reputation.
How to Create a Comprehensive Training Program?
Creating a comprehensive training program is a daunting task. A training program is effective when it supports your business goals or solves a problem. If you start a training program without defining its real purpose, you fail to accomplish the desired results.
You can design an effective training plan by identifying and understanding the training goals. It is also essential to identify possible hurdles during its execution.
Need Assessment Test for Training
Need assessment test for training identifies an employee's current competency level in any area. It is then compared to the required skill-set established for a particular job post or any other post within the organization. This comparison helps identify training needs and find the best solutions to eliminate competency gaps among the individual workforce.
Assessing the needs for staff training requires you to follow the steps mentioned below:
- Identify the purpose of training. The training goals must be clear and support business goals like minimizing costs and improving ROI.
- Determine the actions you need to complete to accomplish the goals. Analyze the employees' current skills and find out what special skills they need to achieve the business goals.
- Develop activities that help facilitate employees' learning and development, including hands-on exercises, distributing study material or pamphlets, visual demonstrations, etc.
- Study the learning styles of your workforce and design the training program to cater to the needs of the maximum number of employees. You can create training material and choose the delivery method that keeps your employees engaged and motivated to learn more.
Establish Learning Principles
Another vital aspect to consider while creating a comprehensive training program is that your learners are adults. Specific teaching methods or delivery modes can either speed up their learning process or slow down learning.
Thus, take care of the following learning principles while designing your training program:
- Every employee wants to feel valued and get the desired respect
- Your employees are experienced. They have the right to form independent opinions
- Each employee wants his training to be task-oriented, engaging, and relevant
- Employees want to know the impact of the training program on their career and professional growth
These principles and employee training needs enable you to develop a highly effective and engaging comprehensive employee training program.
Define Learning Objectives aligned with Organizational Needs
It is essential to make a list of learning objectives aligned with company goals before starting comprehensive training. These objectives include all the tasks that a trainee can perform when training completes. You should add hands-on exercises, case studies, tests, and quizzes to assess employees' understanding of learning objectives. Here are a few tips on creating learning objectives.
When designing comprehensive training, make sure your learning objectives are SMART.
Learning objectives should focus on things your employees can learn and excel in. For example, include working and mechanism of machines, skills required to perform a specific task, and the attitude necessary to carry out the work successfully.
Creation and Management of Training Material
The creation of training material and its management depends on the employee's learning styles, the company's budget, and time. You have to make sure your content focuses on learning objectives.
Some tips for designing material for a comprehensive training program include:
- Involve hands-on, interactive elements for teamwork collaboration.
- Add reading material like handouts and pamphlets.
- Use visual materials, such as graphs, charts, slideshow presentations, and tangible assets for hands-on experience.
- Be open to feedback from trainees throughout the training
- Incorporate real-life scenarios for practical learning.
- Plan your content in a way that trainees take responsibility for their education.
Evaluate The Training
As soon as training is done, the next step is to evaluate its success. You need to check whether you have met all the learning objectives. Here are a few metrics that may help you to find out the efficacy of your training:
- Demonstrations, quizzes, and tests can help determine how well the employees understand the training lessons.
- Observe your trained workforce to determine whether they can apply the skills and knowledge they learned during the training
- Your employees' feedback plays a significant role in the overall progress of the training plan. Focus on the feedback your employees give regarding the program to determine the drawbacks. Ask for their suggestions and opinions to improve the training. You can have an anonymous online survey so employees can give their recommendations easily.
The Bottom Line
Whether you are an owner of a big organization or operate a small business, it is crucial to provide ample training opportunities to employees.
At times, employees feel they lack the required skills to perform their job tasks effectively. Additionally, newly hired employees often need to be trained to accomplish the company's goals. Comprehensive training aims to provide the specific skills and core knowledge required even if your employees are highly qualified.
Waybook is an excellent LMS that helps create practical lessons for employees. You can design a comprehensive program with our tool to provide the best training for your teams.