Employee Training: Personalized Approach for Effective Learning
How to Properly Train Employees
Training is essential for employees to learn the skills required for their job. Without proper training, production can suffer and product quality can be compromised.
To ensure that your training is effective, it should be individualized. Rather than giving everyone the same training, a personalized approach is more productive and will keep new hires engaged.
1. Create a Training Plan
Training can be delivered in a variety of ways and should include different components. Knowing your audience, such as how long they have been with the company or what departments they work in, can help you tailor the training materials and examples to make them relevant.
Identifying the learning objectives is crucial for ensuring that your training program succeeds. This is where the SMART model can come into play. Using this method can ensure that your learning objectives are specific, measurable and actionable for both you and your employees. It can also help you create a framework for your training that will be effective in the long run. Ultimately, it will allow you to get the most out of your employees’ time. Employees need to be able to progress in increments, rather than being bombarded with large blocks of information.
2. Identify the Learning Objectives
To make sure students understand what they’re expected to learn, instructors create learning objectives (LOs) for their courses and modules. LOs communicate the purpose of instruction and guide the development of formative and summative assessments.
Ideally, learning objectives are clear, concise, and student-friendly with only necessary descriptive details and minimal jargon. They should use action verbs that indicate observable behaviors, and be measurable to assess and evaluate progress. Using verbs that are commonly associated with Bloom’s Taxonomy can be helpful when selecting an appropriate level of achievement for a specific objective.
LOs are also important to consider when planning content and creating assignments and activities. LOs should align with associated assessments, learning materials, and instructional activities to provide a strong sense of alignment for instructors, learners, and other stakeholders.
3. Create Checklists
The goal of a training program is to get your employees up to speed in their roles quickly and efficiently. To make the process of getting them acclimated to their new positions as seamless as possible, it’s important to create training checklists that are specific to each role and company.
For example, this employee onboarding checklist template clearly outlines general policies like PTO, HR guidelines, and values while also giving new hires a space to fill out their forms and set short term goals. It even gives them the chance to meet their managers and executives for a welcome message.
It’s important to provide new hires with a clear outline of what needs to be done in the first month so that they feel confident they are succeeding. This will also give you an opportunity to see whether there are any areas for improvement.
4. Create a Learning Environment
A company’s training process should provide employees with a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities. Employees will feel more empowered and motivated when they understand why they need to complete certain steps.
Creating an environment that promotes learning can help ensure employees attend training sessions. Companies can do this by posting educational information on walls and making sure students have access to classroom materials.
Using incentives is also an effective way to keep employees engaged with their learning. For example, gamifying training and having teams compete for an experience can encourage employee participation. Getting feedback is also vital, as it helps employers make necessary adjustments to the program. These adjustments can result in improved productivity rates, reduced costs from mistakes and waste, and higher retention rates.
5. Get Feedback
Employees need to know what they’re doing well and how they can improve. But receiving constructive feedback can be intimidating, leading many managers to avoid it altogether. This is a mistake. Without the ability to glean useful insights from employees, they can’t learn or grow.
The good news is that there are a few effective ways to collect honest, productive feedback from employees. Whether it’s at the interpersonal, team or organizational level, these strategies can help managers gather valuable information to improve their teams and company.
One of the best ways to gather feedback from employees is by holding one-on-one meetings. This gives employees a chance to talk about their concerns in a safe environment and provide suggestions for improvement. Additionally, it allows employees to feel like their opinions are valued and appreciated.