Organizations conduct various training programs to improve the skillset and knowledge basket of employees. It’s a widely held belief that employees should be trained periodically so that they retain their competitiveness and edge. It also ensures that they don’t become obtuse or blunted in their job.
Every training program has a certain set of objectives to be fulfilled. For instance, a soft skills training program would aim to improve the communication skills of employees. This means once the training is complete, the employee should be able to deliver what is expected of him.
Employee training calls for huge investment, time, energy, and efforts. Thus, if an organization is planning to provide training, it should also be able to get some benefit in return. So, it becomes very important to link training programs to business goals.
When you align training programs to your business goals, your business can get the following benefits:
- Improved process efficiency: You can design onboarding training programs to train new employees and enable them to understand the organization’s culture in a better way.
- Increased new business and upsells: You can design a sales training program that can help the sales team to improve their skills set, knowledge about company’s products and hence close the deals.
- Better innovation: You can create a technical training program so that employees can get acquainted with the latest technologies.
- Increase revenue and brand value: You can create a training program on brand awareness and marketing that helps to build a strong positioning of your brand in the market.
- Improved customer loyalty: You can create a product and service training program to provide the knowledge of features and uses of the products and services of your company.
Online instructors, L&D specialists, and eLearning authors can use the iSpring Suite for creating interactive eLearning courses easily, using the themes and content library that it provides.
The following are the ways to link your training programs to your business goals:
Plan for the future
Every organization has certain short-term and long-term business goals like increasing revenue, expanding customer outreach, opening new franchises, improving business productivity, and so on. To achieve these goals, it invests its money in employee skill development which further drives the business forward. By focusing on the vision, mission, and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound) goals of your business, the success journey becomes more exciting.
Identify loopholes and gaps
You must conduct a training need analysis (TNA) to identify the loopholes and gaps in the existing training setup. You should try to find out:
- If employees possess the right knowledge to meet business goals.
- What skills do employees lack?
- If employees are working at their full potential.
- If the existing online training programs are unable to upskill or reskill employees.
- What employees are looking for.
After the training need analysis is done, you can formulate an appropriate strategy or an action plan to align your training program to your business goals.
Set training and development objectives
This step helps you to remove all the loopholes and fill in the gaps mentioned in the above point. Here, you must focus on developing training objectives that aid employees to improve their KSAs (knowledge, skills, and abilities) to achieve business goals.
Communicate the purpose of training
Just mere creation of business goals and training objectives isn’t sufficient. You cannot expect employees to learn and understand everything on their own. Hence, you must communicate to your employees what is expected of them. Tell them, how completing online training courses helps them achieve personal and professional goals. Inform them about various online training assessments that can help them to work on their weaknesses. You can also communicate to them about how a particular training course will help them in the near future. For instance, a course on blockchain technology can give them good incentives and promotions, as they are learning a future technology.
Deliver the training
Delivering the perfect training to employees that accommodates the needs and requirements of both the employees as well as the organization is very important.
Every business’s needs are unique and different. So you need to create eLearning courses that revolve around your business goals. For instance, you can host channel partner training to sell and market your products across different channels and hence expand your business. When you do so, you provide ample knowledge and skills to channel partners, and also reap profits from subsequent sales of your products.
Conclusion
We hope the above step-by-step guide will help you to link your training programs to business goals. To test the effectiveness of your strategies, you can conduct online training assessments frequently and keep track of the performance of employees. Also, you can use mobile learning, microlearning social learning, artificial intelligence, etc to improve the overall impact of your training programs.
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