4 Ways Businesses Can Improve Employee Training Programs

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Employee training doesn’t have to be a big production involving disruptions to scheduling and giving your employees extra work to take home — in fact, that’s the opposite to how things should be. Luckily there are ways to encourage its effectiveness, with most being easy to implement, manage, and track the success of. Read on to learn the tips we’ve gathered through our experience of offering quality training programs to businesses.

Working with attention spans

It’s a fact that there are many tasks and responsibilities demanding our attention in every profession, so it’s no surprise if people are less than willing to spend hours at a time studying for work. The best way to handle short attention spans is to divide the subject into small, workable chunks, which should help with retaining the information and allowing the employee flexibility during the work day.

Instead of making themselves unavailable for a few hours at a time, the employee can resume their normal duties and when there is a lull during the day, they can take that time to learn the training material.

Emphasize employee value

Not everyone likes the pressure of studying and tests, so you need to help them see past the discomfort of putting in the effort to learn and practice new skills.

In economics, there is the idea of human capital, and every time a person invests in professional development, their human capital increases. They become more valuable in the eyes of employers, and will see an increase in their pay, either immediately or further down the line. Employee training benefits both the employer and the employee, which is a win-win situation for all, so be sure to let your workforce know.

Put your employees in charge of advancing their own career

Many employees will take initiative and ask for permission to further their education, and these will be your star players. That doesn’t mean that everyone else is a slacker; you just need to provide a situation where the employees can make some decisions for themselves.

For example, give your employees the choice of 3 development areas from the following 5 options:

• Time management
• Customer satisfaction training
• Business writing
• Training in relevant technical skills
• Computer training

Group discussion

Nothing is more encouraging than allowing employees to learn together. Group discussions don’t have to be formal — even breaking the office into small groups to learn and practice together will help employees to learn the new material.

For more ideas, contact the UniPoint team today!