How to Build an Effective Employee Training Program

Fabi Carino, Award-winning Talent Development and HR Leader, CEO and Founder of Ifacilitate Thrive in a recent interaction with Asia Business Outlook magazine shared his views on the key barriers organizations face in creating an effective employee training program, how companies can ensure that their training programs meet the diverse needs of a multigenerational workforce and more.

One of the biggest challenges is aligning the training program with the company's evolving business needs and goals. What are the key barriers organizations faces in creating an effective employee training program?

Among the main obstacles with which organizations struggle is a lack of collaboration among operations, learning and development (L&D), and HR departments. This disconnect is often driven by a lack of transparency, a lack of coordination, and a lack of understanding of how to communicate between departments. A major obstacle is aligning the business goals with objectives for L&D and HR to ensure that strategic priorities are aligned with the training programs and the organizational objective.

Another challenge is the fact that organizational priorities are constantly changing. There may be a training program in place, but that training may not be appropriate to meet the constantly changing business needs, and the training programs can sometimes become useless in addressing the constant skills gaps. Therefore, L&D professionals must be dynamic and appropriately adjust training content to meet their needs.

To resolve these barriers, companies, especially in HR and L&D, need to continuously conduct needs assessments, such as skills gap analyses. Performance management appraisals are always a good way to measure the need, especially combined with a gap analysis for new employees. Additionally, leadership skills should have a major focus when measuring training and development needs, as leaders should not just have business sense, but also motivation and emotional intelligence to ensure proper development of employees.

Any training programs need to be flexible and relevant to you. Too often, training goals and business goals do not connect effectively, resulting in stale content that is not addressing your training needs. Thus, training modules need to be designed to allow flexibility and rapid updates so they remain relevant to the business. Once you have sourced external providers for training programs, involvement of stakeholders in the early phases of design, is essential to making sure the program is aligned with business goals and provides value. Involving stakeholders also ensures you have engagement with stakeholders and is perfectly timed to avoid a buzzword or passing interest. You are not only addressing a real organizational need but have also gained buy-in. Finally, successful training and development programs rely on coordination between operations, business leaders, HR, and L&D. They also rely on communication and shared a vision for organizational goals.

Tailoring training to accommodate various learning styles, age groups, and experience levels can be a significant challenge. How can companies ensure that their training programs meet the diverse needs of a multigenerational workforce?

One of the essential challenges in managing a multi-generational workforce is identifying the diverse learning styles, motivational factors, and technology literacy between employees from different age groups. Younger generations (Gen Z and Millennials) are usually much more technology-savvy than older generations (for example, Gen Xers, who are considered digital immigrants or "late adopters") due to their unique entry into the workforce, though Gen Xers have shown that they can be resilient and adaptable when learning new technologies.Another significant challenge presented by a multi-generational workforce is the generational gap between employees at different life and career stages.

For example, a 20-year-old new hire, a 30-year-old middle manager, and a 50-year-old executive have different professional needs and hopes. Therefore, their learning needs will be dissimilar; to illustrate, development programmes for an executive must be different from onboarding programmes for new employees or an ongoing leadership programme for middle managers. Organisations would also focus on developing personalised learning pathways considering all of the complex interrelated issues mentioned above, including designing organisationally relevant personalised learning pathways around information from an artificial intelligence platform.

Such platforms can adjust pathways to for each individual based on where they are in their career, what their purpose is for their professional practice and growth, or even their current position, and any other information (such as unique elements contributing to just-in-time learning) to support that person's context for learning; learning which could still be determined by those experiences rather than what generation or cohort learning context or experiences in the workforce belonged to an employee.

When constructing training programmes, it is imperative to include participative activities, like role-plays, gamification, case studies, and activities relevant to work. Simply providing passive information is inadequate - training must respond to different learner styles, including kinaesthetic, auditory, and visual learning. Programmes that afford all of these opportunities are likely to not only be engaging and pleasurable but also of substantial importance to development relating to necessary skills required by the organisation.Ultimately, training should also provide blended learning opportunities that include synchronous and asynchronous approaches, virtual and self-paced modules, and a face-to-face component. The in-person learning experience is an experience worth experiencing - humans are social and learn best in-person when they are interacting with a facilitator, left free to comprehend non-verbal cues and worth even richer communication. In the end, blending different learning strategies is important as there is no one solution that works for everyone; well-designed training programmes will carefully consider multiple levels of learning to blend into one the different needs of a multi-generational work environment.

Keeping employees engaged in training is challenging, what strategies can be employed to maintain employee engagement throughout a training program?

Engaging employees in training programmes starts with knowing your audience. The first step is conducting a needs analysis, and following that, understanding the characteristics of the individual participants to ensure the training is applicable to their specific role, career stage, and organisation.It is worth noting that a truly whole-person training programme cannot be accomplished with classroom training alone. This is consistent with the 70-20-10 training process.

The 10% is formal classroom training, the 20% is through coaching or mentoring when leaders and/or mentors provide direction, feedback, and support, and the remaining 70% is facilitated through on-the-job learning or experiential learning. Therefore, for engagement, training needs to part of a larger learning roadmap that supports application and continuous development. During classroom sessions the facilitator needs to be aware of the level of engagement of the participants. In an age of decreasing attention spans long sessions of lecture can create restlessness and disengagement quickly. There is a need to vary instructional methods for engagement and learning.

In practice, I apply a variety of techniques to facilitate engagement such as  Case studies to ground learning in real life, Self-awareness questionnaires to help participants better understand themselves and create a baseline for development, Commitment sheets to transition individualized thinking into a plan of action for completion of the programme, Role play so that participants firm up their learning based on relevant scenarios, Team discussions to create an opportunity for group learning and accountability, Gamification, for example, leaderboards and games on topic, to retain engagement, while it may add a sense of healthy competition.  Adding rewards to even symbolic (recognition, bragging rights, etc.) can further increase motivation and engagement.

Ultimately, the best program design will require thoughtfulness and intentionality specific to the needs of the group, their individual and collective learning styles, and context specific to their work place experiences. When learning is engaging and has substance, the opportunities for participant to be committed to leaning will otimize them as they attend to their new skill behaviour.