Workplace Learning and Development (L&D) should be a continuous process in any organisation with ambition. Training not only upskills your workforce, but it also makes them feel like you are investing in them. Greater job satisfaction and a sense of unity then enhance work ethic and motivation.

The best staff training programmes also build workforce abilities and knowledge in a way that makes your company more resilient and agile. You can make changes – and weather storms – more readily, if your employees are regularly absorbing a significant amount of knowledge they put into everyday practice.

The US-based Association for Talent Development reports that organisations that support comprehensive training enjoy 218% higher income per employee than those with no formal training plan.

Also, investing in your workforce skills is an invaluable way to improve staff recruitment and retention.

These are all vital reasons why every organisation needs to know how to boost training methods and achieve a more tangible result from company learning and development plans.

Drivers for change

There are clear reasons for designing a robust training program for employees:

• Fill a skills shortage for roles within your business
• Build future talent and competent leaders
• Change the organisational focus and vision

Investing in employee training programs might be considered part of a corporate social responsibility activity. However, more and more organisations are now identifying it as a key business need for sustained growth in the future.

Importance of training and development

Employee training is an important part of job satisfaction. A survey conducted by PWC of over 3,500 participants found the following:

Participants were asked what they value most over the next five years. The most important benefits for the millennials related to training and development activity:

• Almost one-third of respondents chose training and development as their first choice benefit other than salary.
• This was three times higher than those who chose cash bonuses as their first choice benefit.

In terms of development, 98% of the sample stated working with strong coaches and mentors was important to their personal development. The least important was e-learning, but even e-learning was cited to be very important or quite important by 62% of the sample.

However in many sectors, training and development budgets are usually the first to be reduced when the business is doing badly.

For millennials, training and development is the most important job benefit, with over 20% putting it as the number one job benefit. Source: KPMG

What you want or what employees need?

One of the most fundamental ways to increase your training success is to go back to basics. How much of your learning, development and information dissemination is geared towards corporate goals? Do you also substantially focus on the authentic needs of your team?

This links to the fact that many employees believe they are not getting workplace training. The Work Based Learning programme in the UK found that 74% of employees feel ‘held back’ and unable to live up to their potential, as they are not getting enough development opportunities.

The big question is though, how many were given training that proved ineffectual, irrelevant or instantly forgettable?

It’s not like there is a wall of resistance to the notion of constant ‘upskilling’. One UK survey found that around two-thirds of employees welcome and expect training provision throughout their career, irrespective of their role.

A TED Talk by Michael C. Bush sums this all up well. The presentation explains why happy workforces are more productive, and the simple steps needed to make them feel more appreciated. Including trusting them to take ownership of their own decisions and genuinely listening (and valuing) their views.

This must include getting their input on what skills training and knowledge they want, and their preferred delivery methods. It’s feedback and buy-in that becomes the bedrock of the individual development plans for every staff member.

Motivation and goal setting

“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.” – Albert Einstein.

Employees will also feel better motivated and engaged if they know WHY this training is needed. It’s the sort of insight that can be provided during meetings to discuss their individual development plan. It should include (a) how the training will increase their value to the company but also (b) the personal advantages they will enjoy.

This process should be part of a culture of lifelong learning in your organisation.

From day one, every staff member needs to be given a set of goals, and the context those goals have in your overall business vision. This gives everyone in your organisation a clear idea of their role and responsibilities, but also their potential to progress.

Lead by example

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” – John F. Kennedy.

We have covered a lot of the attributes of successful business leaders elsewhere on this learning resource website. One of the most crucial of those attributes is demonstrating emotional intelligence and a willingness to learn and develop alongside your employees.

In a nutshell, effective training starts at the top!

If you are seen to be enhancing your leadership communications skills, for example, you can inspire others to engage in continuous workplace learning.

Make training responsive and inclusive

Everyone learns at their own pace and responds differently to various learning and development methods.

For instance, giving someone a personal skills mentor may seem like a great plan. However, the staff member may feel pressured and self-conscious. Whereas, in-person training in large groups can leave some individuals fading into the background and missing out on progress.

The solution hinges on providing offering a choice of learning options. This in turn depends on good workplace communications, to find what works best for each individual, and then guide them to a solution in a way that supports and nurtures their ambition.

Aligning learning strategy with business strategy

Talent is often one of the most valuable parts of an organisation. Maintaining and growing this talent has become an important part of organisational strategy to stay ahead of the competition.

By aligning training strategies with business objectives, organisations have been able to outperform their competition in the long run.

This has enabled the development of employee training programs that:

• Rationalize spending on learning and optimize the use of resources
• Streamline and outsource operations and simplify the technology landscape
• Focus on the learning programs that offer the best return on investment
• Contribute to shaping skills and behaviours that reflect the company’s strategic direction

Organisations first need to identify any issues with their current training strategy and how they can update this to better align with business objectives and drives. This can be done by reviewing current learning methods, strategies and course catalogues (both in-person and online).

Changes to the business, such as acquisitions, expansion and regulation, provide an opportunity to align the training strategy across the whole business, to ensure the company vision is consistent and focussing on the right areas.

In addition, building out a suitable business case and clear development timeline will help achieve a greater investment impact and buy-in of senior leaders.

How to get buy-in for your new employee training program

These points are taken from the CIPD developing the next generation report.

• Gain senior sponsorship and a figure-head who can really drive the importance of recruiting and developing young people in the organisation. Create a narrative which outlines the business benefits and use line manager champions to share success stories.
• Get clear on your business drivers and check that they are consistent across the organisation – make sure business leaders are in it for the right reasons.
• Find a good partner who can meet the needs of your organisation and help you establish and set up programs.
• Think about your broader HR policies and how conducive they are to recruiting and developing young people, for example questioning your requirements for particular academic qualifications or ensuring you have the right line manager capability in place.
• Make sure you’re prepared for high demand from the business – the benefits of investing in young people are so apparent that the biggest challenge is often the need to expand programmes at pace.

Do workplace training courses work?

Even the best online training courses and most gifted in-person trainers can leave some (or even all) of your employees baffled or only superficially wiser.

Studies have measured attention spans in training and education and found that people in ‘lectures’ start to lose interest as early as 15 minutes in. No matter how important the content is. This is why the famous TED Talk lectures are kept to 18 minutes.

This means if trainers don’t have the skills needed to make presentations successful and interactive, they are talking to a sea of blank faces after just a quarter of an hour!

Being good at both reading and using non-verbal communication (like body language) can help to lift training delivery, of course.

However, you still face something called the ‘curve of forgetting’. This is not a reflection on how much you invest in presentation skills for trainers. It is all about the way humans ‘shed’ superfluous information they receive every day.

Say your audience starts from 0% knowledge at the start of a verbal training session. By the end, you hope they have 100% knowledge of the subject you presented on.

Within 24 hours, 50-80% of that knowledge will be gone. Unless it has been reinforced or added to in some way. A week later there’s a good chance that only 2-3% of the knowledge is still clear and available to use.

That alone is a great reason to rethink your employee learning and development plans and find new training methods!

Use interactive training

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” – Benjamin Franklin.

So, how do you make sure new knowledge is more firmly embedded?

Undoubtedly the ‘hands-on’ approach is crucial. By that, we don’t just mean in-person training delivery. There are virtual training options that are practical, realistic and effective too.

Interactive training includes experiential learning, a particularly effective delivery method for new skills and knowledge.

Experiential means people learning by experience, rather than by simply listening or completing standard online training tasks.

This practical, hands-on method offers a good degree of personalisation too. Trainees can experiment, learn at their own pace, and repeat tasks as needed.

There are other practical ways to enhance workforce skills too, and ensure new job-related information ‘sticks’. There are great examples of virtual venues, equipment and memorable learning methods that support effective training elsewhere on our website. Including how you can use virtual halls and meeting rooms to carry out practice presentations, role-play situations in the workplace, or practice fielding tricky questions, for instance.

Moving from a “push” to a “pull” training program

Employee training programs have historically been “push” based, with content distributed to employees in lectures or classes based on the training department’s schedule, and success typically measured by employee attendance rates.

However, today’s employees expect training to be readily accessible and available whenever they need it. They want to acquire skills on demand, not wait several weeks to attend a classroom based training session. This training applies to both hard and soft skills.

A survey by Deloitte Development uncovered the following:

• 75% of the workforce will be made up of Millennials by 2025, and 45% say they get no leadership development at all
• 45% of North American survey respondents think their current skills will be inadequate in three years
• 59% of global survey respondents think their companies are not giving them opportunities to develop

The “pull” model takes these new expectations into account. L&D is seen as a continuous process and training is provided to the employee when they need it. This works well considering employees are now willing to take the time to improve their knowledge and share their expertise in order to stay ahead of learning trends and other employees.

Millennials crave knowledge. They’re used to having information at their fingertips, and thrive off processing it. In short, if they’re not learning, they’re not developing. And if they’re not developing, then they’re going to start looking for a way out.

Companies need to prioritise learning and, more importantly, upgrade how it happens. Millennials don’t want formal lectures or a bunch of data hitting them in the face all at once.

Source: KPMG – Meet the Millennials

Design the training program so that employees can access it when and where they need it

Employees expect their training to be as accessible and user friendly as other smartphone apps. The emphasis on user experience and functionality of mainstream apps has not yet caught on with professional development experiences.

However companies have been slow to react to the opportunities the digital age has created and insist on getting their employees to use outdated learning management systems, even when they have alternatives in the palm of their hands.

The accessibility of mobile phones have reduced the barrier to learning, allowing almost anyone to learn a topic from anywhere in the world at low cost.

The last few years have seen huge growth in the number of learning solutions:

• Personal coaching
• MOOCs
• Digital learning tools
• Video offerings
• Virtual reality training
• Cloud-based training systems

Employees expect their L&D to be standardised, easy to use, intuitive and for all training material to be included into a single platform so they can access it quickly and on demand. This enables them to perform their job more effectively and helps them build their career.

It’s important to create solutions which integrate social capabilities into the training content, so users keep engaged and interact with other users to solve any problems more quickly. Learning will move from a siloed experience to interactive learning where users are free to learn the most relevant topics at that time.

Applied learning works

Much of the above is about ensuring your workforce training and development is authentically relevant to your team, as part of a strong, nurturing corporate culture.

All of the evidence about effective training also points to the importance of applied learning opportunities in your organisation. This could be experiential training or virtual simulations of job role situations. Or, reinforcing learning by making online training readily available constantly, and regularly delivering new training options.

Even if you have a strong ethos of continuous and well-orchestrated learning and development in your company, you can’t afford to get complacent. Regularly measure how effective your training methods are.

This goes hand-in-hand with giving your team opportunities for ‘active recall’. This is when they discuss their new abilities and knowledge with others or participate in constructive training follow-up sessions.

Conclusion

Current trends present a unique opportunity for companies to redesign their learning and development training programs toward the new generations of employees, providing them with more desirable skillsets that better meet the needs of businesses.

Looking ahead, technology will continue to streamline the delivery of learning and development programs, creating a more enjoyable experience for the employee at reduced cost to the employer.

Organisations that are able to innovate by combining these new platforms with a strong understanding of their own strategic objectives are likely to see improvements in ROI, as well as in the engagement and retention of their workforce.

Organisations have experienced substantial benefits from investing in developing people at the start of their careers. The impact they have on the organisation is substantial, both culturally and at the bottom line.