7 Steps to Developing an Effective Employee Training Program

When a successful training program is supported by a strong learning culture, organizations can benefit from greater employee satisfaction, improved morale, and lower turnover.

Building a Successful Employee Training Program Unique to your Organization

High-impact training programs on a department or even organization-wide level have many moving parts and elements that can affect the feel and direction of your training and development efforts.

Leaders need to consider items such as goals and objectives of the program, sourcing curriculum to use for each workshop or training session, deciding whom to include, and how the material should be delivered to employees. However, a truly successful training program can be broken down into three fundamental components: buy-in or support of the program’s mission, development of a learning culture, and adequate resources to support the program and its learners.

Although there is no one formula or process for an organization to use that will guarantee success, there are several essential steps to building a quality program:

Understand Your Organization’s Mission or Purpose

Understanding your organization’s mission or purpose is fundamental to developing any training program. If an organization does not have a strong grasp on why it exists, then leaders will not know where to begin the conversation. 

For example, ask if the organization’s purpose is to deliver a good or service to a client, or does it create a product for a specific market? The answer to a basic question such as this can help guide the direction of the training needs analysis.

Focusing on different elements of the organization that creates its competitive advantage or helps it stand out from the competition is vital. Every organization is structured differently and understanding how the organization functions in order to fulfill its purpose will help identify what employees are trying to accomplish and how to best prepare them for success.

 How organizations approach the delivery of training will depend on their mission, culture, and defined goals.

Conduct a Training Needs Analysis

Utilizing a data-driven training approach is the foundation for a strong organizational learning strategy. By using available data and information gathered—many times—through normal operations, leaders can measure and assess the overall effectiveness of employees carrying out various aspects of the organization’s mission. 

The use of data in developing a learning strategy can help leaders ensure dedicated resources will align with desired outcomes and generate a positive return on investment. Available data to consider in a training needs analysis will vary by organization and industry. However, common sources of data can include performance or production metrics, data captured in financial statements, industry benchmarks, and stakeholder feedback from surveys, employee interviews, or quality of work reviews.

A successful training needs analysis will help the organization focus on the areas in need of improvement while being cognizant of employee needs. Ultimately, it will be the roadmap used to create a strong training program.

TrainND is the state’s most comprehensive and inclusive workforce training network in North Dakota. Designed with the goal to expand opportunities by training employees to achieve more for themselves and their employers by reduce barriers to workforce training by connecting local and statewide business and industry, as well as government and nonprofit organizations, with innovative and relevant training curriculum andinstructors.

Identify and Develop Program Goals and Objectives 

At the conclusion of conducting the training needs analysis, an organization should have a solid understanding of where operational shortcomings are starting to appear or are already present. It is also possible for a smooth-running organization to develop training objectives that ensure staff is adequately prepared for industry or economic change on the horizon. Anticipating and adapting to external change early enough can create a competitive edge, but only if employees are adequately prepared and trained.

Crafting goals and objectives for a training program is a similar process to developing ones for your broader organization. Training goals and objectives need to capture what the organization is seeking to accomplish with its program. Does the training needs assessment show declining sales numbers or customer service ratings? Then the necessary training goal or outcome should be to increase the volume of sales or customer service satisfaction.

 Training objectives will help guide the organization to achieve its learning goals. To help ensure success, objectives need to be clearly defined, realistic, and SMART. Employees should know from the get-go what the training is intended to do and clearly understand how the desired outcomes impact their job function.

Determine Who to Train and Understand Their needs

Identifying what employees to include in an organization’s training program may not be as easy to determine as leaders might think. This is especially true with complex organizations that contain many specialized units and departments responsible for fulfilling different aspects of the organization’s mission.  

Using the example of increasing sales, an organization may need to look beyond simply providing soft skills training to its sales team. If the sales team is supported by information technology and supply chain management professionals, it is possible that additional soft and/or hard skills development is necessary for these individuals as well. Even a team-building session between these teams may be necessary to better understand department functions, needs, and capabilities.

Effective employee training is more than simply running a class for an hour or two.

Understanding the training and learning needs of identified employees is also essential to success. Leaders should ask how the organization needs to deliver the training and select the method that complements employee learning styles to the best of the organization’s ability. 

Identify Internal and External Training Resources Available

There is one more question leaders need to ask themselves in order to finish gathering all the necessary pieces to complete their organization’s training puzzle. Should the organization provide training internally or use professionals from the training and learning industry? 

Like so many of the questions proposed so far, the answer depends on a variety of factors unique to each organization and its employees. Both internal and external training approaches have their pros and cons, and the choice is often dictated by the financial investment an organization can afford or is willing to dedicate to the program. Even organizations capable of making extensive financial investments to internalize their training program may need to seek external professionals to supplement in some manner the limited internal knowledge leaders or trainers may have on a topic, or if fresh, new ideas are needed to jumpstart innovation.

However, organizations can internalize many training functions if the resources are available. If leaders can identify enough highly knowledgeable and skilled employees capable of providing colleagues with quality learning opportunities, an organization might be able to effectively implement its own training. The funds saved on utilizing employees already on payroll can be used to implement a quality learning management system (LMS) or learning experience platform (LXP) designed to support these training opportunities.

Chose the Learning Delivery Method

 After weighing all the collected data, assessing available resources, and prioritizing training needs, it is time for organizational leadership to determine what the best method or approach is for satisfying the identified training needs. 

 Ultimately, an organization will need to strike a balance between cost and return on investment generated from the program. A positive return on investment helps with more than simply showing the impact an effective training program can have on the organization’s bottom line, it gives leaders a reason to continue their “buy-in” with the necessary resources to sustain a strong learning culture.

Smaller organizations may find it cost-effective to use a blended approach to developing a training program. Using both internal resources, such as knowledgeable front-line staff or department managers to produce more specialized training, and external resources, such as online training courses and consultants, can create a robust, cost-effective training program for those with limited resources to invest.

Whereas larger, more complex organizations with available resources may internalize most, if not all, of their training programs through a formal training department or unit within the organization’s HR division. But internal resources can have their limitations resulting in some need for outside training materials and assistance.

Determine How to Measure and Assess Program Effectiveness

Training needs and delivery methods are always changing as organizations and employees evolve. Measuring a training program’s impact and effectiveness is vital to the program’s success and should always be ongoing. 

There are a few approaches and tools that can be utilized to measure the overall effectiveness of a training program:

• Incorporate the Kirkpatrick Model when evaluating training results.  
• Review of financial and other sources of data, preferably the same sources used in the needs assessment, to measure any improvement or increase in key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Pre- and post-training surveys or assessments.
• Employee Appraisals or evaluations.
• Participant interviews, either individually or as a group (or both). 

Incorporating a mechanism to measure training effectiveness will help organizations ensure employees receive quality, job-relevant training that meets their needs and objectives. When a successful training program is supported by a strong learning culture, organizations can also benefit from greater employee satisfaction, improved morale, and lower turnover.  

By the end of this development process, no two training programs will look exactly alike. How organizations approach the delivery of training will depend on their mission, culture, and defined goals.

Powered by Bismarck State College, the TrainND Southwest workforce training program can help guide any organization through the training development process. TrainND Southwest staff can help design effective training programs that create engaging professional development learning opportunities geared toward fostering employees at any career stage. Contact Joseph Camisa to see if TrainND is the right fit for your organization’s training needs.