The Ultimate Guide to Employee Training

Preparing a new hire to embrace their new role with your company is challenging. Not only do you need to onboard them into your organization's culture and policies, but you'll also have to train new hires for their tasks and responsibilities within their team. 

At the same time, you can't let new hires languish once onboarding is complete. Employee training needs continuous monitoring and development to keep employees engaged and minimize skill gaps in your company. 

In this guide, we'll break down everything you need to know about employee training. We'll talk about types of employee training, how to choose the suitable training methods, and why employee training is so vital to your organization. 

💪 What is employee training? 

Employee training is the process of teaching new hires the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in a company and their role.

It's an ongoing process that begins when workers join your organization and continues for as long as they're employed there.

When anew employee joins your company, training overlaps with employee onboarding, but the two are distinct. 

Onboarding focuses on welcoming the new hire to the company, while training is designed to get workers productive in their role. 

Tip: Where onboarding has a clear start and end, training continues throughout an employee's work journey. 

Effective employee training fosters ongoing growth and development throughout a worker's time with your company. Investing in the employees you already have helps you mitigate the impact of labor shortages and changing skill requirements. 

❗️ Why is employee training important? 

It's hard to overstate the importance of employee training. With an effective training plan in place, your employees and the company benefit in many ways. 

Let's take a closer look at some of these benefits. 

👩‍💼 Employee training benefits for workers

Thinking strategically about employee training and development creates a culture of learning throughout your organization. With a learning culture in place, everyone understands the importance of employee training and prioritizes it accordingly. 

Here are just a few things your workers gain from effective employee training: 

• Job satisfaction: When workers know how to do their job and have the resources to do it well, they feel more satisfied in their role. Satisfied employees tend to be more engaged at work, leading to higher productivity and retention levels. 

• Leadership development: Employee training offers opportunities for every hire to develop new skills and prepare to lead the company in the future. Not only is this enticing to workers, but it also helps prepare for the longevity of your organization. 

• Career mobility: Effective employee training shows your staff a clear path for growth and career mobility within the company. By consistently gaining new knowledge and skills, workers can prepare themselves for any innovation in your industry — or even lead the change themselves. 

Put another way, when workers have a clear path for development and have access to training, employee engagement increases dramatically. 

With more engaged employees, your organization reaps benefits across the board. 

🏢 Employee training benefits for the company

Engaged employees are effective employees. In fact, engaged workers are 17% more effective than non-engaged employees. 

Engagement translates into increased productivity, talent retention, and profits on a company-wide scale. 

Let's take a closer look at these employee training benefits: 

• Improved productivity: Role-based training is critical for shortening a new hire's time to productivity. By guiding employees through a logical training plan customized to their needs, you can help them learn the most important skills first and gradually develop other skills necessary to grow into their role. An early focus on productivity also helps the new hire feel more successful in their position faster, leading to quicker job satisfaction. 
• Talent retention: Satisfied employees with a clear understanding of opportunities for growth in the company have little reason to look for work elsewhere. Employees committed to staying and growing with your company save you money on hiring replacements. Plus, you retain the informal knowledge your workers have gained through training. ‍
• Skill gap closure: With a formal employee training plan in place, you can identify and remedy any gaps in skills or knowledge on any team. Whether you're trying to meet the core functions of a role or looking to future-proof your organization's leadership, employee training is the way to address any lacking skills. ‍
• Industry competitiveness: Developing your employees individually and as a team gives you an advantage over your competitors. You can pinpoint areas of weakness and train your employees to overcome them. Plus, collaborative learning cultures tend to breed creativity and innovation, giving you an even more competitive edge.

Together, these employee training benefits add up to increased profits. 

When you foster your employees' development in line with your company's needs, you create an environment brimming with productivity and creativity. Add in the cost savings from retaining your top talent, and you've got a wider profit margin. 

💡 6 Types of employee training

When a new hire joins a company, there's so much information they need to know. Not only do they need training in the specifics of their role, but they need to get familiar with company policies and procedures, plus cultural norms, to be truly successful. 

Onboarding training

Onboarding training is an umbrella term that covers the types of employee training a new hire needs to get started in their role. It tends to focus more on getting workers familiar with company processes than the specific skills to carry out their responsibilities. 

Tip: Often, onboarding training will encompass some or all of the other types of employee training listed here. 

Technical training

Technical training, sometimes called role-based training, covers employees' specific skills to do their job. 

Because it depends on an employee's position, technical training needs to be highly customized to each team or role. For example, the People Ops team can oversee employee learning and development from a high level, but technical training also requires the cooperation of a new joiner's manager and peers. 

Typically, technical training focuses on the technologies employees will utilize in their role, emphasizing keeping up with competitors. For example, sales training may involve understanding your industry's latest customer relationship manager (CRM) technologies and tactics to maintain a competitive advantage.  

Compliance training

Some training topics are mandated by local or federal laws, accrediting bodies, or corporate policies. Any required training is typically referred to as compliance training. 

Compliance training might include: 

• Workplace discrimination training;
• Sexual harassment training;
• Health and safety training;
• Security training;
• Diversity training.

It's wise to incorporate some compliance training into your new employee orientation. This way, new hires have the information they need from the start. 

Tip #1: Your People Ops team should keep a close eye on when policies and regulations change at any level. New rules mean it's time for more compliance training to get everyone up to speed. 

Tip #2: Judging by the latest phishing statistics, you should also include training on data security and privacy.

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Some compliance training may need to be completed by every employee every year or so. Build these requirements into your employee training plan, so your organization stays on track with all required training. 

Security & safety training

To keep employees and your company safe from both physical and virtual threats, develop thorough security and safety training plans for employees. Some safety training may fall under the umbrella of compliance, but even when it's not required, this kind of training is essential for engaged and productive employees. 

Traditional workplace safety training focuses on physical hazards. So if your company operates in person, cover things like fire exits and emergency protocols for your office. 

Digital safety and security are now just as crucial for companies, mainly if you operate remotely. Digital security and safety training can cover things like: 

• Cybersecurity awareness;
• Phishing training;
• Password best practices.

Cybersecurity training for employees can also cover the basics of how your company's digital infrastructure works to protect company, employee, and customer data. 

For example, if you use a password manager to give multiple employees access to shared accounts, this is when you should cover when and how to use the cybersecurity tools correctly. 

Product & sales training

Every employee needs product and sales training, even if they don't work directly on the product or in sales. Understanding the basics of what your company offers helps every hire do their jobs better. It also gives workers the information they need to understand and represent your brand no matter where they go. 

Give a product overview in your new hire orientation to get all new joiners up to speed on the basics. Then, dive into deeper product knowledge depending on the new hire's role. 

Sales onboarding and training will require some of the highest levels of product knowledge. But other teams need to understand the product and sales tactics too. 

Tip: Make sure your training plans for marketing, customer service, and other product-adjacent teams get as much detail as they need to do their jobs well. 

Leadership training

Creating a leadership training plan contributes directly to job satisfaction for workers while also preparing the next generation of leaders within your organization. 

Leadership training can help current managers and supervisors extend their skills or prepare entry- or mid-level workers for increased responsibility as they grow with the company. 

With a strategic leadership training plan in place, you can help your managers foster better team collaboration. Leadership training can include specific skills around decision-making, giving and receiving feedback, and team communication.

Start preparing future leaders early to protect your company from leadership skills gaps. Non-manager employees can begin developing necessary skills long before the organization needs them, allowing plenty of time to absorb leadership knowledge into their regular work. 

➡️ Use Zavvy's new hire training checklist to track progress on different types of employee training for each worker. You can customize the template to meet your organization's precise training needs.

👨‍🏫 6 Methods for employee training

You might think of employee training as long sessions reminiscent of your most boring school lecture. But effective employee training blends several methods and tools to create a training plan customized to each team or role. 

• In-person training takes place in a work setting, allowing immediate interaction and feedback between the trainer and the employee. In-person training can be one-on-one or in a group and could be at any location relevant to the type of training. 

• Virtual training takes place in dispersed settings, and its use has increased as remote work rises. Virtual training can be live, like a Zoom meeting, via email, Slack, or an employee enablement platform like Zavvy. 

• On-the-job training allows employees a real-time view of their work. Managers or peers can give immediate feedback on customer interaction or deliverables, and new hires can ask questions about what they see on the job. 

• Peer-to-peer training leverages the informal knowledge of colleagues to improve productivity and skill sharing. Coworkers can share insights from performing the job daily while also building networks for collaboration, productivity, and creativity. 

• Microlearning reinforces training concepts through short bursts of learning on a daily basis. Grounded in cognitive science, your employees can access microlearning via email or Slack to make it easy for new hires to complete training and retain knowledge. 

• Social learning relies on employee collaboration to share knowledge and skills. It helps workers feel welcomed into the company culture while building a collaborative environment. 

Tip: You can also incorporate tactics like gamification into your training plan. Using a mix of these methods in your overall training plan keeps employees interested while helping them retain more information.

📈 Employee training trends

As the workforce continues to evolve, keeping an eye on employee training trends is critical so your training and development program can remain as effective as possible. 

Employee training is trending toward being more interactive and engaging, with tactics like gamification and scenario-based learning drawing trainees into the subject and helping them retain more information. 

➡️ Stay updated with the latest trends in workplace learning and development. Start leveraging current employee training trends. 

🔍 How to choose the right training method for your employees

The best employee training is customizable to each worker's needs and role. No two employees need the same training because they bring different skills and experiences to the team. 

Creating customized training plans for every employee is no small feat for your Learning and Development team. To do so, you need to consider: 

• The organization's long- and short-term goals;
• Your current workforce resources;
• Training budgets and other constraints;
• The kind of training that your employees need or want.

Tip: Conduct a training needs assessment as a first step to building a new training strategy. You can do this on an organizational, operational, or individual level.

Start by considering why you want to conduct training. What specific organizational problem or employee skill gap are you trying to solve? 

Then, compare your workers' current skills and knowledge to the abilities you'd like them to have. You can use competency models or employee surveys to understand the gap between where your employees are in their skills versus where you'd like them to be. 

Tip: Now you have a list of the specific skills you need to address in your training plan. With this list in hand, you can evaluate your current training plans and resources or begin assessing new employee training methods you'd like to use. 

Every employee training method has its advantages in specific contexts. When you conduct a training needs assessment, you aim to find out what benefits you need to close the skills gap you've identified. 

For example, on-the-job training might be the most efficient way to train employees if you are looking to upskill a few entry-level workers into more complex work. 

But if you're trying to reinforce broad concepts for your entire team, microlearning training modules deployed via Slack will likely yield better results for the lowest investment of resources. 

➡️ Use Zavvy's training needs assessment survey to understand where your employees stand and what skills they'd like to develop. 

👀 What does effective employee training look like? 

How do you know when you've implemented an effective employee training program? 

Ideally, you'll see fewer knowledge and skill gaps among your employees and increased productivity and retention. But let's take a closer look at the key characteristics of an effective training program. 

• Clear strategic plan: Effective training understands the overall business goals and can connect employee training directly to those goals. It also helps workers see their paths for development within the company. 

• Collaboration between HR and team leaders: People Ops understands training, but managers understand their team. Effective training incorporates a high degree of cooperation between People Ops and team leaders to ensure that training meets teams' needs on an operational level. 

• Multiple training methods: Varying how you engage employees in training can help improve its effectiveness. You'll match the suitable training method to the proper knowledge or skills while keeping employees engaged and interested in completing training. 

• Ongoing feedback and evaluation: Creating strategic training plans for your organization isn't a one-time project. As the workforce evolves, your training needs will shift too. By incorporating feedback mechanisms into your training program, you'll always have a sense of the company's current employee training needs. 

➡️ Learn how to evaluate your training effectiveness so you can always fine-tune your training programs to meet the exact needs of your workers.

➡️ Kick off employee training with Zavvy

Employee training is essential for any successful business. Investing in your current employees and finding the best ways to address knowledge and skill gaps will reduce costs and improve productivity to increase profits.

Training helps your workers, too: they'll be more engaged and satisfied at work, leading to higher retention and career mobility. 

Put simply? Employee training is the best way to future-proof your company. 

Nurture your organization's talents with Zavvy's employee onboarding software and train your employees with impact.