The business world is constantly changing and reinventing itself. To succeed in this dynamic environment, I believe that every organization must have a training plan just to keep up.
Training builds an ability to look outward collectively and face the future as it arrives. It prepares you and your colleagues to hit the ground running ahead of the competition.
A smart training strategy remains one of the best ways to get new material to the people that need it in your organization – and to get critical information flowing back from them.
Why Train at all
Traditionally, there are two main drivers for training.
- To provide new information to an employee or client about a product, service or business practice, to solve an existing problem or head off one on the horizon.
- To upskill employees by distributing already existing information throughout your organization.
Upskilling?
Training was often targeted at only new hires or to those recently promoted or transferred. Increasingly though there is a focus on upskilling to develop and improve all employees.
In fact, there are at least four ways to offer a full spectrum of quality training products to your employees.
Training as Change Management
Change is constant in every facet of our lives. Unfortunately, change is reflective so we can’t see it until it is gone. We can only look back and say, “Hey, remember when there was a phone with only one camera?”
Training experiences attune employees to the effects of change and give them an outlet to share their insights. A primed work force will be better able to rise up to meet the new challenges; to be able to look up and see where we are headed.
Good training forces us to stop, take stock, look ahead, and then act.
Training as Internal Communication
Training builds new communication lines. It is that simple.
Training is an opportunity to share knowledge, demonstrate expertise and establish cross connections within your organization. When knowledge workers are given avenues to mentor or input to training as subject matter experts, they enthusiastically share their knowledge. Even busy team leaders and executives will take a few minutes to share ideas and expertise through videos, voice-overs or interactive chat sessions. Engage your experts to share their knowledge, build pride and connections.
In fact, during the training development process, we have seen subject matter experts have rich discussions and make important decisions on their own content…a process they find enormously helpful.
A well-designed eLearning course, for example, uses experts from your organization to identify the knowledge and skill gaps and then develop the content to fill those gaps.
Training as Knowledge Review
In this digital age, we have achieved so many things, but it does have a downside: information overload. It seems we are either not saving the right information or saving everything ever written! Who amongst us hasn’t diligently saved every thread of every important email, only to be unable to find THE critical one a few weeks later! What do you keep, what do you throw out and what do you pass on? What is a piece of business-critical information and what is peripheral or contextual? Putting together a training program requires leaders to take stock and agree on the critical business information that people need to be successful in their role.
Let a good Instructional Designer weed through the fluff to help direct the focus of your content.
Training for Millennials
Recent information from the Conference Board of Canada finds that Canadian employers are increasingly delivering learning services to their employees. Both the number of hours allocated and the cost spent per employee for learning and development are up in 2018. Other sources confirm this upward trend, with over 50% of surveyed companies saying they spend more than $1000 per employee per year. Training, once perceived as a perk, is a requirement for Millennials and Gen Z.
As training professionals, we understand this and can build training plans and design assets that meet all your needs.
Call us to have a chat about what YOUR organization might need.
