How To Customize Employee Training And Development
The key to creating customized employee training is offering content that is relevant to employee roles. However, this can be more challenging than it seems. Most organizations make the mistake of designing training content geared towards general job functions, as opposed to role-specific core competencies.
Although training employees in the basics with additional soft skills is important, this strategy often leaves employees either overtrained or undertrained and lacking in core competencies.
Below, you will find tips on how to create interactive training that focuses on employee roles yet incorporates objectives important to the organization.
Tip 1: Understand Employee Roles And Responsibilities
You first need a basic understanding of employee roles and responsibilities within your organization. What skillset is required for each role? What tasks and objectives are assigned to each department? What departments or roles are cross-functional? By knowing what each role and department does, you can steer away from topics that are not relevant to them. For example, you are creating a training program for a major airline with over 100,000 employees. Each airline employee, from flight attendants to pilots to gate agents, has distinct roles. Understanding the responsibilities and skillset needed for each role will help you formulate targeted training ideas.
Tip 2: Talk To Employees
You can take the guesswork out of training customization by asking employees directly about their roles. How do they spend their day? Which of the previous training offerings helped, and how was it useful to them? What type of additional training could help them function better? Conduct employee interviews, review internal processes/procedures, make on-site job visits. Employee insight will ultimately help you identify and focus on training topics that are relevant to an employee’s daily life. For example, you might talk to a flight attendant and gather information on what they do during a flight or talk to a gate agent about what they do during their shift.
Tip 3: Identify Important Processes, Policies, And Procedures
When customizing, you should also consider and recognize critical processes, policies, and procedures across your organization. Are there any widespread compliance or safety procedures that all employees need to be trained in? Are there ethical policies that need to be incorporated? Are there industry regulations or requirements that need to be considered? For example, airline industry regulations are always changing, and training must align with these changes to keep the airlines compliant.
Tip 4: Integrate Relevant Information
Once you know what information is important to each level—individual, departmental, and organizational—customization becomes easy. It is here where you outline what training topics should be implemented and where they should be implemented. The airline industry, for instance, does an excellent job of this. With safety driving their industry, they have customized their safety training for individual roles, departments, and employees across all levels. For example, some courses are aimed at flight attendants, others tailored for entire in-flight operations, and a handful directed at all employees.
Tip 5: Incorporate Different Learning Styles
Another factor to consider is how each employee learns. For example, an employee may learn visually, auditorily, kinesthetically, or via reading/writing. By incorporating employee learning types into training, you will not only keep employees engaged but increase their retention. A few different ways to do this include utilizing instructional videos, job aids, and in-person role-plays. For example, you might create an airline instructional safety video alongside a job aid outlining key safety points.
Tip 6: Get Creative
How you deliver your content is as equally important as the content itself. Delivering content that is repetitive or complicated is a surefire way to disengage your employees. Fortunately, there are many customization options to help you, like gamification, in-person role-plays, and spot quizzes.
It is especially important to offer applicable scenarios to employee roles. This will not only keep them engaged but encourage them to practice the skills you want them to have. For example, conducting a role-play between a flight attendant and a passenger having a medical emergency onboard an aircraft.
Conclusion
Customizing your training by role ensures that employees are getting the training they need to succeed in their roles. The key is to know what their roles are, what organizational nuances to incorporate, and what training methods would make the most impact.
