Designing a training program
Training programs are essential internal processes for the proper functioning of a company. With them, the company trains employees, making them more prepared to deal with their daily activities. It is important to emphasize that training programs are different from one-off trainings. The program aims to train and develop technical and interpersonal skills of employees and the occasional training only technical skills to deal with specific situations. Therefore, the training program is broader and the impact is long term. In this article we will explain you the way designing a training program.
A good training is one in which the training focuses on solving a problem or a company need. In addition, it must also be clear and take into account the teaching methodology, which must be adapted to the profile of the target audience, in this case, the employees of the corporation.
Many companies still don’t invest in a training program or they don’t know how to properly implement this strategy. In addition to failing to reap the benefits of this strategy, not promoting corporate education actions can waste time, efforts and resources by betting on inefficient methodologies and initiatives.
Training Program: Benefits and Challenges
Investing in business education is investing in the success of your organization: having more technically qualified professionals with well-developed social skills makes your company more competitive, as your employees will adopt the best practices of their functions, delivering higher quality products/services to their customers. customers and even higher productivity.
However, it is not enough to implement any isolated training and think that it is enough. This strategy must be continuous and result from a lot of planning. Otherwise, the action may become inefficient by:
All of this can turn a beneficial action like the training program into something that generates a waste of time, effort and money. Imagine putting together an entire strategy, investing so many resources, and it ends up not giving the desired results? That would be pretty ugly for HR…
That’s why it’s essential that every training program is done with a lot of planning. Only then will your employees be trained in various skills, improving their performance, benefiting the company and ensuring its competitive advantage in the market.
For this to happen, we have prepared a step-by-step guide of what you need to do to implement an effective training program in your company.
Training Program: How to do it
Developing a training program is not a seven-headed bug! Check out how to apply this strategy in your organization in 5 steps:
1- Identify needs and define objectives
The first step is to understand what your company really lacks: what skills, knowledge and attitudes are necessary for your employees to better fulfill their daily role and bring better results? What are the gaps in people management that prevent employee performance from increasing? It is necessary to know the problems well before creating the solutions.
For this there is the Survey of Training Needs (LNT) , a tool developed to help discover the gaps, difficulties and opportunities in the management of employees. Using this method facilitates the work of identifying the points that need improvement in the team.
With the considerations of this survey, and thinking about the future that the company wants to have, it is time to define the objectives that this training should fulfill: to train employees to use certain software? Awaken the spirit of collaboration in the team? Develop new leadership? This question will guide the next steps.
2- Know the target audience
Another point that needs to be studied before setting up the training is the profile of the people who will carry out the training. Understanding the needs, expectations, repertoires and desires of these professionals will help to put together an action that is truly engaging and efficient.
It is not possible to apply commercial-specific training , full of industry jargon and concepts, to your legal team. Imagine talking about leads, prospects, sales objections… Would this kind of action really be necessary? And imagine developing a lecture-only class with slides full of texts for those who learn better with other teaching formats? It would be a good idea?
Knowing who you are talking to is one of the basic rules of every communication process. And it is also valid for education, including corporate. So do research with the target audience of the training before setting up the training.
3- Choose the most appropriate methodology
After all these studies, it becomes easier to find out which strategy is closest to the company’s goals and reality. And there are so many options for training methodologies for HR to choose from: from traditional methods to technological innovations.
A group of collaborators who have not yet fully mastered the web language can take advantage of the benefits of blended learning to make the transition from a face-to-face methodology to an EAD, for example. And if trainings are low on engagement, gamification can turn this mandatory activity into a more fun and effective experience by using the playful side of games to motivate employees to improve.
That’s why it’s important to know the strategies available on the market, even combining them to get even better results.
4- Run the training program
All these research and considerations lead to the step of getting down to business and making the training happen in practice. But this step involves several processes:
- Produce training content according to the needs of the team/organization or start a partnership with a trusted company that prepares educational materials;
- Prepare the location – physical or digital – for training, paying attention to the equipment and materials used, the availability of instructors and employees, authorization from leaders and other demands;
- Explaining to employees how everything will work, including demonstrating how the training program will benefit not only the company, but the employee himself – both professionally and personally.
In this way, everything is aligned to implement the training and move on to the next step.
5- Evaluate and Improve the training program
The last step is important for the whole process – even if it is ignored in some companies. It is essential to constantly evaluate the results of training to know if they are being effective and also to identify the points that need to be improved and those that are working. In this way, corporate education increasingly positively impacts the performance of the organization and becomes a valuable strategy for its success.
This step may even seem like a challenge for some HRs, however, by adopting technological methods, this task becomes easier and more agile than in traditional ones. Methodologies such as gamification often offer detailed and real-time reports on the performance of employees in activities, helping professionals to have a reliable monitoring of the results of the strategy.
