There are two ways to scale up business output. Although increasing your workforce is the most popular choice, doing so also comes with higher overhead. A better alternative is to improve your worker productivity through corporate training.
According to a study published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, businesses with fewer than 100 employees offer about 24 minutes of manager training each year.
For businesses with up to 500 employees, this figure fell to 12 minutes per year. This neglect of employee development is unfortunate because prioritizing corporate training improves worker productivity. This improvement, in turn, can directly impact a company’s output.
Designing a Curriculum: The WWH Approach
The effectiveness of any corporate training program depends on three factors: 1) who you train, 2) what you train them to do, and 3) how you train them.
Who You Train
The first step in designing a curriculum is understanding the profile of your learners. Do your employees have access to computers?
How comfortable are they with e-learning tools? How many hours can they afford to train outside their working hours? The answers to these questions should help you design the right pedagogical approach.
What You Train Them to Do
The next step in the curriculum designing process is assessing the exact objectives of your training program. Do you want your learners to be adept at operating specific tools at the end of the program?
Or is your objective to align them with your work culture? Your training objectives should determine what kind of learning tools you deploy.
How You Train Them
The third and final step in the curriculum designing process is devising an effective way to train your employees. Your training strategy should depend on your learner profile and learning objectives.
Your goal is to design a training program that is suitable for the people you are targeting and the objectives you want to achieve.
Picking the Right Learning Tools
Once you have designed a training curriculum, the next step is choosing the right learning tools. Two factors go into deciding the best learning solutions: the learner profile and the cost of your training program.
Training blue-collar workers on your new equipment will inevitably require a hands-on training process you cannot offer in a classroom.
At the same time, if your employees are in different locations, it can be expensive to train them in a classroom. An e-learning setup is more cost-effective in this case.
As a rule of thumb, trainers should always try to offer e-learning programs for their workers unless face-to-face training is absolutely unavoidable.
The reason why is that an e-learning setup removes any constraints with respect to an employee’s demographic profile or geographical location. E-learning makes it possible for your business to open new locations or hire remote workers without any training-related constraints.
You might consider using gamification tools to improve engagement and achieve your learning objectives. Picking the right e-learning tool depends on the kind of training you wish to provide.
An onboarding program for new recruits is not likely to change frequently, so it is a good idea to build a learning package through a learning management system (LMS).
But perhaps you are looking at offering a monthly or bi-annual training program to all employees. In this case, it is a better idea to use a live-conferencing solution such as webinar or video conferencing.
Measuring Your Corporate Training Program’s Impact
Building an effective training program for your employees is incomplete unless you measure its impact on them.
Modern LMS tools come equipped with advanced analytics capabilities that help trainers measure the engagement rate among learners.
Some trainers, especially those in large enterprises, insist on conventional tools such as assignment engines to assess the impact of their training programs.
But no matter your strategy, you need to continuously feed your impact measurements back into the curriculum design process.
Some training programs tend to lose their impact over time. But new educational tools bring with them advanced pedagogical methods that improve learner efficiency.
A continuous assessment strategy helps organizations tweak their training programs to suit their organizational training needs.