How to Choose the Right Training

Traditional training methods are tried and true.  Job shadowing and classroom training with groups is a very effective way to deliver essential information to your staff so they are prepared to begin work.

Obviously, employee learning is something that is ongoing and continues well after beginning work in their respective job but we need to establish an initial understanding of each employees’ own tasks, duties and role within their department. Even though traditional learning is quite effective it is far from efficient. Factors such as high cost, huge time commitments, limited flexibility and capacity cause many organizations to look into alternative training solutions.   If you are considering implementing a new training solution I’m going to cover some key considerations that I’ve found to be essential for working with various clients in developing custom learning and development solutions.  

Automation

You should have a good understanding of your current capacity for delivering and managing training for groups and individuals. In most organizations over 100 employees without a dedicated training and development team, you will want a solution that takes away some of the leg work. Make sure if you are stretched thin you find a product or service that will reduce the workload involved in delivering training content. This will allow your team to focus more on developing better training strategies, courses and provide the time to properly deal with individual employees requiring additional assistance or more attention.  

Tracking and Management

Do you use an excel sheet to ensure your whole workforce is compliant and up to date? All it takes is one mistake or oversight and that document is no longer effective. Training platforms today can do some amazing things and one of the best aspects is their ability to track and manage not only training content but also employee training completion rates, certifications, access to training materials and tracking expirations and scheduling renewals. A great training platform should not only reduce the possibility of human error but it should also take care of the incredibly boring and tedious aspects of our jobs which for many individuals is tracking and data entry.  

Methods of Delivering Training Content

How you present information has a big impact on how it is received and retained by your audience (staff). This is why the organization I work with believes in blended segmented learning, which basically means we like to deliver content in many different ways in nice and manageable amounts. This method has the best success rates for various different groups. This is where it is important to understand your audience, you must deliver information in a way that will have the best chance of being understood. Since any larger organization (over 100) will have a pretty diverse group of people we always push to go with current best practices and provide various methods of delivering content so you have the best chance of truly fostering learning. Make sure whatever training solution you choose has flexibility in how you present information, not everyone learns the same way so go with a solution that will meet everyone’s needs.  

Engagement of Users

One of my clients said it best, “There is training and then there is learning.” I love this statement because it is so true! If training doesn’t engage your staff (meaning they feel involved) then we can’t truly foster learning and without deep learning, training becomes a lot less effective. When looking for a training solution make sure that your staff will have the opportunity to participate in the experience. This can mean a lot of things such as controlling the pace, having interactive features, quizzes, the ability to go back and using visuals and videos to break up the information into different mediums. These features will keep employees more interested and lead to far higher rates of knowledge retention and successes from training. I hope some of my experience with clients will help you find the perfect training solution for your organization. There are a lot of other factors to consider such as cost, implementation, internal operations of your organization, etc. but I HIGHLY recommend you consider the four factors I listed to make sure that whatever solution you choose it will surpass your desired results. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that your staff are well prepared and ready for success!