Best Practices in Designing Employee Training Courses

Employee training courses are known to work wonders in creating a highly dynamic, innovative, professional, and skilled workforce. Despite the size of a business, these courses can go to great lengths in enhancing employee productivity, improving operational efficiency, streamlining technological adoption, and thus, increasing revenues. More so, as their primary aim is to enrich human capital, employee training courses can help hone their existing capabilities while acquiring new skills. 

However, when it comes to designing these courses, most managers are required to navigate an extremely complex path. On one hand, they are expected to devise a standard course that caters to different learning styles, but on the other hand, they are pushed to adopt a methodical, uniform, and comprehensive designing approach. To top it, they also have to keep time utilization, resource efficiency, and cost-effectiveness in mind.

Related Read: How to Choose the Right Employee Training Software

1. Determine Your Objective 

When you undertake the challenging job of designing an employee training course, the first thing you need to do is – determine your objective. Ask yourself why do you want to design a course? Is it meant to solve a particular problem or do you aspire to achieve a certain goal with it? Develop a clear picture of what your final aim with the course is. 

Having such an objective to guide your course structure will help you create a detailed training timeline. This timeline can then serve as the basis for chalking out an integrated syllabus, covering key informational aspects, and following a logical presentation sequence. 

However, make sure that you don’t rush through the course design. Give it both adequate time and proper attention. 

2. Understand Your Audience

Once you have identified the precise objective that your employee training course intends to achieve, focus on trying to understand your audience. Think about who your employees are and where they come from. Are they beginners, who have just graduated from business school, or are they veterans who have years of experience behind them?

Based on your understanding, design a course that suits each one of their learning styles and learning needs. For example, recent college graduates will respond better to kinaesthetic aids like interactive quizzes and activities while older employees would prefer credible, written material. 

Ensure that every member of your audience is exposed to personalized training formats so that the overall workflow of your business can be improved. 

3. Employ Audio-Visual Aids

Including audio-visual aids and real-life practical scenarios within your course design can prove to be a boon for the learning curve of your employees. Presenting them with an interactive story that they can relate to and engage with, gives your employees the exclusive chance to get actively involved with the nooks and crannies of your training program. 

Research says that this can help them accurately retain almost 65% of the information presented, for as long as a year! More so, introducing real-life scenarios through gamification can equip your employees to enhance their problem-solving skills without having to bear any negative consequences. 

In other words, including audio-visual aids as a tool for employee training will work wonderfully to increase the knowledge retention rates of all your employees. 

4. Use Variable Techniques

The biggest mistake which most organizations make while designing their employee training courses is to include didactic teaching as the sole form of information delivery. Although this type of teaching does have its own set of benefits, it does not cast any lasting effect. This is why it is vital to club and consolidate variable teaching techniques within the course design.  

These techniques can largely range from cooperative learning, visualization, and behavior management to inquiry-based instruction, webinars, conferences, or conventions. Such great diversity will allow you to leverage your employees’ interests and thereby improve their learning capability. 

5. Assess the Outcomes

Last but certainly not the least, make sure that your employee training course is designed to gather feedback and assess outcomes on a real-time basis. These outcomes can either be assessed on formative or summative grounds. 

Formative assessments include self-reviews and objective tests, which can give you a detailed idea about how your employees are progressing on the learning curve. Summative assessments, alternately, allow you to find out specific areas of difficulty and make course corrections accordingly. 

In either case, these assessments, when properly undertaken, can easily help you boost performance levels and raise learning outcomes in an instant.

Also Read: 5 Employee Training Management Software that You Must Consider

A well-crafted employee training course equips your workforce with the latest competencies while enhancing their knowledge retention.

Employee training courses have undergone significant transformations. For one, they are now being shifted entirely to digital modes where technology plays a great role in replacing the traditional, one-on-one, classroom teaching methods. Furthermore, the emergence of eLearning platforms coupled with AI and VR are also lending employee training designs a highly immersive, interactive, and sustainable look. The future of training, therefore, looks set to behold a good amount of progress, profit, and productivity. 

At HurixDigital, we develop highly compelling employee training courses complete with interactive elements and assessments. Get in touch with us and we will help you design an effective training course for your workforce.