Leveraging your brand in your corporate training content not only addresses your specific challenges, but also yields higher retention and engagement rates.
Here are 7 ways your organization can leverage your brand in a custom training program:
- Integrate Your Organization’s Logo, Color Palette, And Graphics Into Training
- Follow Your Organization’s Brand Guidelines
- Reward Learners With Custom Badges And Certificates
- Create Course Templates According To Brand Guidelines
- Produce Branded Learning Reinforcement Materials
- Reuse Animations, Graphics, And Illustrations From Training For Other Resources
- Provide Branded SWAG
80% of talent acquisition managers believe an organization’s branding has a large impact on their ability to hire quality talent. Branding not only affects an organization’s ability to hire new employees, but also impacts their ability to retain their current employees.
Your brand says a lot about who your organization is, but how can you leverage your brand in employee training and development?
At Roundtable Learning, we work with clients across industries to create one-of-a-kind training programs that reflect their brand identity. We know the value that custom training can bring to an organization in regards to consistency, loyalty, and engagement.
This article will differentiate between custom vs. off-the-shelf content, provide benefits of customized training, and explore 7 ways to improve corporate training through branding.
Custom vs. Off-The-Shelf Training Content
Custom training meets the specific needs of an organization with one-of-a-kind training content. With targeted learning objectives and a clear structure, L&D professionals can control both the content itself and the context in which it’s presented.
Custom training content is often considered more effective than off-the-shelf content because these materials are more learner-centric. While an off-the-shelf training program may be the right fit for organizations looking for more foundational training, others may prefer custom content tailored to their specific needs.
Ultimately, custom training content creates training that’s specific to your organization’s business needs and learning objectives, better preparing learners when faced with challenges on the job.
4 Benefits Of Custom Branded Corporate Training
The investment into custom training content comes with several benefits, including:
- Addresses Your Specific Challenges — By using training materials custom-made for your organization, you address role-specific learning objectives that learners can connect with.
- Higher Knowledge Retention Rates — When learners are presented with custom training content, they’re more likely to connect with the information because it’s relevant to their role and organization.
- Creates More Organizational Unity — Custom training encourages learners to complete tasks and expand their knowledge base, which in turn creates unity across an organization.
- Higher Learner Engagement — With custom branded training, organizations can incorporate organizational identifiers (internal jokes, references, and mascots) that create a more personal, engaging experience for learners.
Now that we know the differences between custom vs. off-the-shelf training, let’s explore 7 ways your organization can leverage your brand identity in your corporate training.
7 Ways To Improve Your Corporate Training Through Branding
1. Integrate Your Organization’s Logo, Color Palette, And Graphics Into Training
Your organization’s logo, color palette, and graphics demonstrate your brand’s personality and are key identifiers that your employees will recognize. Integrating your corporate logo, colors, and graphics into training accomplishes three things:
Boosts brand recognition
Develops employee loyalty
Builds credibility and trust
When integrated into your corporate training program, these design elements create brand recognition and loyalty among learners while demonstrating your investment in their development. We recommend incorporating your logo, colors, and graphics into your training’s headers and footers, navigation bars, and job aids.
2. Follow Your Organization’s Brand Guidelines
Corporate brand guidelines set the standard of visual design elements that an organization uses to represent their identity and mission. Brand guidelines are essential for an organization to be recognizable within their industry and build up their authority among both their workforce and consumers.
While some organizations have internal graphic design teams that design their brand guidelines, others choose to outsource the development of their guidelines to top-tier branding agencies who are experts in corporate identity building.
Brand guidelines typically include the following information:
- Typography — Font specifications, including size, spacing, etc.
- Color Palettes — Color specifications for fonts, logos, graphics, etc.
- Logos — Size, layout, placement, etc. of your organization’s logo
- Layout — Formatting of headers, text, images, charts, etc.
- Brand Voice — Build consistency in communication across channels
With brand guidelines, your organization can ensure employees across departments create materials and present information in a consistent, professional manner.
3. Reward Learners With Custom Badges And Certificates
Upon completion of their training, your organization can reward learners with digital or physical badges and certificates. This gives learners a sense of accomplishment and gratification, while continuing to establish your brand identity.
Badges are rewarded to learners throughout the completion of their course, while certificates are typically given to learners at the end.
We recommend incorporating your organization’s logo, colors, and typography into your badges and certificates so learners can proudly display their accomplishment.
4. Create Course Templates According To Brand Guidelines
Course templates create greater consistency across your training program by mapping out a standard format to base your training around. Common to eLearning, course templates come with the following benefits:
- Create greater consistency across training modules
- Make course development faster
- Build familiarity and trust among learners
By presenting training materials in a consistent format, learners will become more familiar with their content and know what to expect out of each activity. While course templates help developers create training faster, templates ultimately help create a consistent, familiar experience for learners that’s easy to access, follow, and complete.
Read More: 10 Compelling Reasons You Should Use Templates for eLearning
5. Branded Learning Reinforcement Materials
Learning reinforcement materials are used throughout a training program to help learners review ideas and test their understanding of key concepts.
These materials come in the form of pre- and post-work activities, including:
- Reading informational articles
- Completing eLearning modules
- Writing in a learning journal
- Providing a job aid
- Participating in weekly study sessions
With custom branded learning reinforcement materials, your organization can prevent learners from forgetting 90% of what they’ve learned within the first month after training. These materials can be customized with your organization’s logo, colors, and original content.
6. Reuse Graphics From Training For Other Resources
A large benefit of custom training programs is that animations, graphics, and illustrations used in the training can be stored in an organization’s digital library. Once stored, organizations can authorize various personnel across the organization access to these assets.
These graphics, designs, and images can then be reused for other training purposes. For example, an organization may reuse images that were featured in an eLearning module and incorporate them into a job aid. This creates consistency around the training and makes good use of resources that learners can recognize.
7. Provide Branded SWAG
Branded SWAG (stuff we all get) is a great way to personalize training and typically includes any of the following items:
- Mugs
- Bottles
- Shirts
- Notebooks
- Pens
SWAG helps to increase your brand recognition and business exposure, while also building loyalty among employees. To create SWAG, we recommend that your marketing team collaborates with your L&D department to generate fun ideas employees are sure to remember.
Are You Ready To Add Branding To Your Corporate Training?
This article has covered 7 ways your organization can add custom branded materials and techniques to your training program, from following your style guide to handing out SWAG.
Looking to get started with creating your very own custom training program? Reach out to an expert on our team or explore more of our resources on all things L&D today!
