Creating relevant, useful, and advantageous corporate training programs for your employees is an essential responsibility of functional human resource departments, while scouting, recruiting, and hiring top talent employees with relevant aptitudes in a certain business niche is important as well. Asking your employees to achieve certain job tasks and responsibilities without giving them the relevant knowledge and ability is like asking a neighbor to take your dog for a walk without giving him a leash.
Recent research shows that employees crave learning opportunities in the workplace as one recent survey found that 74% of all workers felt that they weren’t achieving their full potential at work due to lack of development opportunities.
The increasing role of technology in almost aspects of the business world means that even the best employee talent will need to continue to refine and upgrade their skillset in order to stay at the forefront of the competitive global economy. Human resource departments, then, play an important role in helping employees develop their talents and skillsets through offering corporate training programs.
These programs can be either mandatory or optional, and can be designed for a number of different objectives. From helping employees continue their professional formation, to facilitating a deeper insight and understanding among the workforce of long-term business goals and vision, corporate training programs for employees play an influential role in developing a competent and capable workforce that can help your business grow and succeed.
Characteristics of Successful and Effective Corporate Training Programs for Employees
The specific design and implementation of a corporate training program will largely depend on what your company wants to achieve and the direction it is going. However, all successful and effective corporate training programs share some of the following characteristics:
- Motivated Program Managers: Ideally, a HR department will hire or delegate a specific person who will be responsible for the development, planning, and execution of corporate training programs offered to employees. This program manager invested should be deeply motivated to helping employees develop their skillsets in order reach their potential while simultaneously furthering the goals of the company. Effective marketing of these training programs is also essential so that the workforce will be knowledgeable and persuaded to take advantage of the offered programs.
- Properly Assessing Needs: All effective corporate training programs must first correctly determine what parts of the workforce need to be trained and on what skills or topics. A 2015 ATD research study found that only 38% of managers believed that corporate training programs were truly responding to the needs of their workforce. Investing time in money in ineffective corporate training programs will not only drain the budget of HR departments but can also further disengage and discourage employees.
- Align Training Needs with Organizational Goals and Initiatives: Lastly, the training needs of the workforce need to be properly associated with long-term business goals and current company initiatives. One recent survey revealed that only 12% of learners thought they applied the skills gained from corporate training programs to their jobs. While these programs might help employees develop their professional skillset, it is essential to relate those increased employee talents and aptitudes to furthering company goals.
Types of Corporate Training Programs
Ineffective corporate training programs for employees can cost businesses upwards of 13.5 million dollars per 1,000 employees each and every year. Identifying the best type of training program should be a main priority for HR departments. While orientation and onboarding training programs are standard training programs that all HR departments implement, below are a few ideas of corporate training programs for employees that might be effective in furthering the skillsets of your workforce, creating a stronger company culture, and furthering your long-term business growth goals.
Leadership Skills
One of the best ways to retain top workforce talent is through allowing these employees to ascend into managerial and leadership positions within the company. Unfortunately, employees with the best skillset might not necessarily also have natural leadership and managerial abilities. Offering corporate training programs centered on developing leadership skills can help retain those employees while also constructing a company culture centered on mutual accountability and a supportive and motivating work environment. Leadership skills training programs can be developed for all types of employees, including emerging leaders at lower tiers all the way up to senior leaders at high-level managerial levels. These programs can include a wide diversity of content, including but not limited to behavioral interviewing, communication skills, conflict resolution, developmental coaching, team building, time and priority management, and others.
Communications Skills
Developing and enhancing employees communications skills in a changing and increasingly virtual workplace environment is essential for both a healthy company culture and achieving business goals. Too often, misaligned priorities between departments within a business result from ineffectual communications strategies and can make or break a specific company project. Corporate training programs centered on productive and enhanced communication skills can focus on nonverbal communication, active listening, proper writing techniques, presentation skills, effective virtual communication strategies, among others.
Soft Skills
How employees act within a workplace environment is often just as important as the knowledge and skills that they have. A top talent employee or manager who doesn’t have the soft skills to relate to his coworkers can essentially render his or her knowledge and skills impractical and useless. Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character or personality traits, attitudes, career attributes, and social and emotional intelligence quotients. These skills help employees to deal with clients and coworkers, navigate their workplace environment, and work as a team on common company objectives. Soft skill training programs can play an important role in strengthening company culture and reducing employee turnover rates.
Time Management
Lastly, time management training programs can also help to radically improve employee productivity. One recent study found that 21 percent of employees waste up to 5 hours a week on non-job related activities. With social media and Google searches literally at the tip of employee fingers, motivating the workforce to effectively manage their time is essential. Implementing time and attendance software is a great way to make sure that your employees are being honest and transparent with the hours they work, but time management programs can further help employees develop strategies to prioritize work projects and tasks, meet deadlines, effectively multitask, and plan and schedule their work week for maximum productivity.
The Availability of Online Corporate Training Courses
Fortunately for HR departments and program managers, there are dozens of online training courses that can be utilized for effective employee training. Instead of reinventing the wheel each and every time a company wants to offer a program, the following online training courses and online training software are surprisingly affordable and offer proven, internationally recognized employee training content that can help develop the skillset of your workforce.
- Dale Carnegie Training Courses: This organization offers a wide selection of both in person and “live online” training courses ranging from leadership training, presentation training, sales training, customer service training, and people skills training. What makes this independent training program so effective and able to deliver business results is that the experience actively engages learners from the initial contact through follow-up and support to reinforce key behaviors. The Dale Carnegie Training Courses relies on innovative methodology to support the development of skills and habits needed to sustain performance change.
- ERC Leadership Development Courses: This company is a recognized global leader in business leadership development and also offers leadership assessments and leadership development plans that can enhance initial employee training courses. ERC offers employee leadership development training either at their Ohio-based office, at your organization, and via webinar format.
- Talent LMS: Recently, several online employee training software products have also hit the market. Talent LMS offers a wide range of employee training and development software products that can automate training processes, reduce costs, and also simplifies course creation for your workforce.
