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This toolkit pack includes four checklists & templates for the onboarding process, a new hire's first day, and facilitating your onboarding buddy program.
According to a survey published by Forbes in 2023, 59% of employees report receiving no workplace training. This highlights a curious trend in which most employees rely on self-taught skills despite acknowledging the importance of workplace training for professional growth and team improvement.
Employee training is often looked at as an expense rather than an investment by organizations. However, any company that invests in workplace training is investing in its success.
Employee training programs serve as a vital tool for organizations seeking to enhance the skills and productivity of their workforce. These programs are not just a means to fill knowledge gaps; they are a strategic investment in human capital, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability.
From onboarding new hires to upskilling seasoned professionals, employee training programs are designed to align individual growth with organizational goals, ensuring that teams remain competitive, innovative, and ready to tackle future challenges.
Employee training programs are systematic initiatives designed by organizations to enhance the skill set, knowledge, and performance of their employees. These programs, tailored to meet specific organizational and individual development needs, can range from technical skill enhancement and software training to soft skills development and compliance training. They are integral in equipping employees with the necessary tools and competencies to perform their roles effectively, adapt to new technologies and methodologies, and contribute positively to the organization’s growth and success.
Businesses conduct different types of employee training programs depending on the size, requirements, and activities of an organization. Here is a list of the most common types of training programs in a workplace.
Effective employee orientation training provides basic organizational information that new hires need to prepare for their role in a company. The orientation program benefits both employees and employers by educating new hires, setting them up for success in their new roles, addressing any questions they might have, and helping them contribute to the organization right away.
Here are some key components of an employee orientation training program:
Onboarding training is the process of getting your new hires up to speed, understanding their new responsibilities, getting familiar with company culture, and becoming productive team members quickly.
Employee orientation is a 1-2 days process, whereas the employee onboarding process is a series of events that take place for a duration of a week, a month, or even a year in some cases. Onboarding is responsible for truly integrating an employee within an organization.
Some key components of employee onboarding include:
By the end of onboarding, an employee must have a clear sense of their responsibilities and goals in the organization. They must also know how to obtain the resources they need to do their jobs and understand how their role contributes to their team’s and company’s objectives.
This toolkit pack includes four checklists & templates for the onboarding process, a new hire's first day, and facilitating your onboarding buddy program.
Compliance training is a workplace training type mandated by legislation, regulation, or policy. It educates employees on the laws and regulations applicable to their job function or industry.
An effective compliance training program helps prevent poor conduct and ensures proper governance in an organization. It helps minimize risks, maintains reputation, and provides a better and safe workplace environment for employees.
See how you can create in-app, interactive compliance training content in your digital tools and process with Whatfix digital adoption platform.
Here are some examples of courses covering government-mandated and industry-specific compliance policies.
Product training includes all the information about your organization’s goods, services, or products that employees need to learn to perform their jobs effectively.
Depending on different employee roles, product training focuses on various aspects and has other learning goals. Value-adding product training enables a marketing team to reach the right market and a sales team to answer the critical questions customers are looking for.
Collect in-app feedback with native surveys, create contextual user onboarding experiences, drive feature adoption, and provide self-help support with Whatfix
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that enables product managers with a no-code platform to create and launch in-app feedback surveys, product tours, user onboarding checklists, interactive flows, announcements, hotspots, tooltips, self-help wikis, and more – all without engineering dependencies. Analyze your product usage to identify friction areas, understand engagement, and build user cohorts.
Here are some of the most common product knowledge training objectives to help different groups get the most out of the product training:
Leadership training for your existing leaders is a way to refresh and reset their mindset. On the other hand, leadership training for other employees helps them better understand their current roles and learn what it takes to become exceptional leaders in the future.
Leadership development training programs have several important benefits, such as:
Here are a few important steps to get started on the leadership training program:
There is an infinite number of new software applications and technologies emerging in every industry. In order to avoid the risk of falling behind the competition, employees need to continuously adopt the latest technologies or update existing ones. Technical training enables your workforce to build core technical skills and master the technical aspects of their jobs.
Here’s how you can facilitate technical training for your employees:
Digital Adoption Platforms enable training content integration within the application to help train employees on new software. It gives employees access to all relevant information, resources, documentation, and workflows they might need to work efficiently on new software. This guidance can be accessed whenever an employee is stuck anywhere in the software without having to look for any external help.
Quality assurance training helps employees better understand quality assurance activities and improve processes that ensure the final product or service meets set quality standards, which leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Q/A training benefits organizations in many ways:
Sales training is designed to improve your sales team’s skills by teaching them sales techniques, software tools, and novel approaches to selling. Effective sales training programs focus on helping sales teams define the benefits of products and services, address the unmet needs of the client, and get them one step closer to a purchase.
Below you can see how customer-facing teams can use Whatfix for sales teams to create guided tutorials, in-app workflows, and embedded self-help widgets that link to your SOPs – all right in your CRM.
Here’s what you need to look for in a sales training program:
Soft skills training programs focus on personal attributes, such as communication, conflict resolution, and problem-solving, that are necessary for an individual’s success and career development. Across an organization, in every business unit and employee role, soft skills are crucial for gaining new clients, improving current customer relationships and service metrics, and building a stronger team dynamic.
Here are the steps to design a soft skills training program for your organization:
Team training encourages beneficial team dynamics, ensures every team member has the same professional growth opportunities and improves employee morale, collective efficacy, and member satisfaction.
Here’s how you can effectively implement team training in a workplace:
Diversity training programs create awareness for diversity-focused issues within the workplace with an aim to facilitate positive interactions and reduce prejudice and discrimination among employees.
These programs encourage employees to embrace people with diverse cultures and backgrounds, including – race, color, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, gender, physical and mental ability, etc. Implementing a diversity training program is an important step toward reducing the risk of workplace discrimination and harassment claims.
You can begin to create an effective diversity training strategy with these steps:
Safety training is especially important in industries that involve physical labor as it reduces the risk to individual employees as well as a company’s potential liabilities. Some safety training programs, such as fire prevention or lockdown drills, are somewhat universal, while others are highly industry-specific. For instance, companies that use potentially dangerous chemicals will need rigorous safety training protocols, while food-service companies must provide food safety training.
Safety training sessions can be held in-house, but organizations usually hire external practitioners with more adequate knowledge to train their employees.
Upskilling is the process of employees learning new skills and acquiring relevant competencies needed for today’s work environment as well as for the near future. It focuses on improving employees’ skill sets, usually through continuous training programs, to help them advance in their jobs.
Here are some steps you can take to upskill your workforce:
With a digital adoption platform like Whatfix, enable your employees with in-app guidance and contextual self-help IT support to accelerate the adoption of new software implementations, employee onboarding, change initiates, and more. Whatfix’s no-code editor enables IT teams with a no-code editor to create product tours, interactive walkthroughs, task lists, smart tips, pop-ups, self-help wikis, and more. Analyze and measure user engagement and software usage to identify friction points, measure digital adoption, and improve employee digital experiences.
Reskilling is a process where employees learn new skills to move into a different job role within the organization or to meet the new demands of a current role. It typically occurs when an employee’s previous tasks or responsibilities become irrelevant, often due to advances in technology or skill gaps.
Here are some steps you can take to reskill your workforce:
Training is crucial for an organization’s development and success. Creating training programs enables your workforce to be more productive, efficient, adaptable, and improve their skills in communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
The significant benefits of employee training include:
Employees lose motivation and morale if they cannot perform according to an organization’s expectations. Employee training sharpens the skills and knowledge of your workforce, which results in a boost in their morale and adds a sense of job satisfaction (as well as security). Satisfied and motivated employees are an excellent asset for organizational success as they innovate new ideas faster, which can enhance the quality of their project results.
Every job role has its unique set of challenges and requirements. Mistakes and errors will likely occur when employees need more knowledge or skills required for a particular job. Workplace training makes employees more proficient and reduces the chances of them committing errors on the job. It strengthens the functioning and abilities of your workforce.
Training acts as a productivity booster for your employees and they’re equipped with the skills and support they need to succeed. Employees feel confident when they understand what is expected from them and are provided with the required training programs to do their jobs. This improves employee performance and enhances team member productivity.
A company with a culture of continuous learning and development leads to 30-50% higher retention rates. Employees want opportunities to learn and develop at work. This is why prioritizing training gives your employee retention rates a healthy boost and inspires your top talent to stick around for a long time.
As technology evolves, many companies need help to keep up with the demands of digital transformation. One of the core reasons behind failed or poorly adopted transformation efforts is undertrained employees with a digital skills gap.
Enterprises need digitally skilled employees who can engage in agile, continuous learning to keep pace with workplace changes. Upskilling programs that build on employees’ existing skills and reskilling programs that train employees in entirely new areas help you leverage your current employees to meet the new age digital demands.
Employee training programs, when thoughtfully implemented, are the cornerstone of organizational success. However, building a new employee training program for your business can feel daunting.
Here are some tips for you to create employees training programs for your workplace effectively:
To overcome the traditional culture of monotonous PowerPoint slides and conventional learning methods, L&D teams are embracing a new interactive style of training that enables employees to learn in the flow of work.
Interactive training content engages each individual and connects them to a task by placing them in the driver’s seat. Interactive learning focuses on learner engagement which leads to higher productivity and performance.
Here are a few ways you can make online courses more interactive:
Leveraging employee training software is a game-changer in crafting effective training programs, primarily due to its ability to deliver personalized, accessible, and engaging learning experiences. Such software provides a platform for creating tailored training content that addresses the specific needs and skill levels of each employee, enhancing relevance and retention.
Whatfix digital adoption platform emerges as an effective training solution, especially for organizations navigating complex software and systems. Whatfix enhances the learning experience by providing contextual, in-app guidance that allows employees to learn by doing. Whatfix offers step-by-step walkthroughs, pop-up tips, and task-specific support within the application itself. This hands-on approach is particularly beneficial for technical and software-related training. By integrating seamlessly into the daily workflows, Whatfix ensures that training is not a separate, isolated activity but an integral part of the employee’s work experience, leading to higher adoption rates and more effective learning outcomes.
Create contextual user onboarding flows, drive adoption of new features, and make in-app announcements with Whatfix
Whatfix is a no-code digital adoption platform that enables product managers to create contextual in-app guidance, product-led user onboarding, and self-help user support – all without engineering dependencies. With Whatfix, create branded product tours, user onboarding checklists, interactive walkthroughs, pop-ups, smart tips, and more – all enabling customers and users with contextual guidance at the moment need. With Whatfix, analyze, build, and deliver better user experiences.
Identify the purpose of a training program that is, what you want to accomplish with a particular training program – Improve employee performance? Address a knowledge gap? Teach a new skill?
Identifying the purpose of your training puts you in the right direction for creating and setting realistic employee training objectives. Your organization’s training goals are measurable outcomes that learners are expected to achieve by the end of a training program.
Setting goals is a key responsibility of managers, and they must offer their employees some guidance and motivate them to attend the next training program. To define clear and measurable goals, consider using the SMART goals framework (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based).
For more effective employee training, it is critical for organizations to turn their training platform into a scalable, collaborative network that provides individualized learning tied to every employee’s performance.
Segmenting training programs based on business units helps in scaling and facilitating employees’ learning and business activities. Here are a few ways to segment your training programs:
Invest in personalized online learning tools with algorithms that gather information on your employees and suggest learning activities based on that information.
A digital adoption platform is an employee training solution that integrates with digital tools to provide automated, personalized training in the flow of work. It has artificial intelligence (AI) technology that determines the learner’s role in the company, personal development goals, and current training needs to suggest the right training module.
Measuring training effectiveness via employee surveys might seem basic, but they are highly critical in getting the answers to determine whether or not your training program was successful. The process here is to create anonymous employee surveys and feedback forms, collect feedback in real-time, measure the training immediately, and implement remedies without any delays.
Whatfix DAP helps measure training effectiveness by intelligently gathering feedback on each walkthrough training and determining where your content creation efforts gave the best results. The SaaS platform integrates with survey tools to gather user feedback from specific locations (in-app) to ensure higher response rates.
You can see how your employees can leave feedback directly in their apps and processes without leaving the flow of work, in the graphic below:
Let’s look at a few examples of how companies are creating and managing their employee training programs.
Cooley is a global law firm that has built a virtual mentoring program called Cooley Academy Mentoring Program (CAMP) to improve their onboarding process. The purpose of this program is to pair new employees with experienced individuals and bring them up to speed more quickly and efficiently.
Through this program, mentors teach, train, and support new hires through mentoring sessions, and prepare them for their job roles. Mentorship is essential to the onboarding process because it gives new hires a support system to understand their role and responsibilities much faster than they would on their own. Furthermore, the company uses reporting tools and mentoring platforms to understand how mentoring relationships perform through progress and feedback.
Amazon empowers its workforce through the Amazon Training Academy, a comprehensive initiative to foster employee growth and development. This platform provides a wide range of training programs tailored to different roles within the company, from warehouse and logistics operations to corporate and technical skills.
By leveraging state-of-the-art learning technologies and methodologies, the academy offers flexible and interactive learning experiences, allowing employees to develop skills at their own pace and convenience. These programs are not only focused on enhancing current job performance but also help employees feel confident and take on different roles in their careers. One such program is Associate2Tech, where front-line employees are trained to move into technical roles, even with yet to gain any previous IT experience.
The Amazon Training Academy exemplifies the company’s investment in its human capital, ensuring that its team remains at the forefront of industry developments and best practices.
At the Bank of America, the leadership investment initiatives offer a range of leadership development training programs.
For example, the Women’s Next Level Leadership Program focuses on helping multicultural women with their career development through assessments, strategies, and tactics offered in an eight-month virtual online learning program.
Additionally, the New Manager Program provides upskilling programs for new or promoted managers to lead their teams successfully. The training program includes interactive and personalized learning resources to fit each individual employee’s learning style and needs.
There is a multitude of employee training programs available that are specific to different aspects and benefits. Consider the most suitable training program for your workplace depending on the overall organizational and individual employee requirements.
Implementing the right training program for your organization enables you to create rich learning opportunities that can empower your employees to grow.
With a digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix, L&D teams can create learning and training content with a no-code editor that overlays on your employees’ digital applications, processes, and workflows
Implementing Whatfix as your employee training solution will help you create:
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