Employee training is important in building a relationship with an employer
The nature of the workplace is changing and the relationship between the employer and their employees is becoming more important than ever before. Building and sustaining healthy employee relationships is a must if you want to attract and retain the top talent in your sector, and only by understanding what employees want and expect from their workplace can you really be successful in achieving this.
A survey published in The Telegraph in 2019 showed that ‘opportunities for progression’ was the top concern for 31% of employees and was the second top concern for a further 20%. While considering that this may not be reflective of employees across all sectors, lets read this a signpost to the changing expectations of employees in general. Workers want to know that they have a promising future at where they work and to know their hard work over the years will come to fruition with your support.
But ‘progression’ doesn’t always have to mean promotion. Progression can also mean professional and personal development without a change of position through workplace training. Training can push employees to learn and test new skills, get to grips with upcoming technologies, and improve emotional wellbeing and interpersonal workplace relationships.
Benefits of in-house training
With an in-house training programme, you have the flexibility to accommodate all the benefits and success of a workplace training within your own business. It’s a cost-effective solution to using external training provides and gives your teams a chance to develop interpersonal relationships in the process.
Operating training in-house gives you the flexibility to adjust training to the changing needs of your business. Perhaps you need to learn a particular new piece of software or get to grips with a new business system that is being introduced. You might have identified a weakness in your team’s performance that needs to be addressed immediately.
Maintaining control of in-house training allows you to be agile in your response to the changing needs of your employees and the wider business. In some companies this will be a key facet of success given the pace of change in certain sectors. In-house training can help make the provision of training more cost-effective in these cases too. You take away the expense of using a third-party training provider to utilise the expert knowledge and experience of senior staff or your dedicated in-house training department.
Designing a successful in-house training programme
In-house employee training can be set up and designed to meet several goals and outcomes. Firstly, training should be designed to meet clear cut business needs that will help your company improve your product or service. Training can also address the needs and requirements of your employees. Perhaps you have a certain team that would benefit from using a particular piece of software or maybe an employee from that team has approached their manager with this suggestion.
Designing your training around the continual need of your business and employees is a recipe for success. You should set training objectives that are in line with wider business goals and consult with senior employees as well as junior positions to ensure the focus of training is worthwhile. For this reason, the involvement of management and senior positions is important to keep training on focus and aligned with the wider business. Any goals that you set from the training should be realistic and measurable to give you
feedback on how you should adjust the provision of training moving forward. Gaining feedback from participants will also provide valuable insight into whether the training is working as intended and how it can change for the better moving forward.
Opportunities for Employee Training
1. In-person training
Conducting in-house training in-person is a proven and successful method. It gives your employees a more personal experience and arguably a better learning pathway. In-person training can be conducted on company property or at a hired venue, and it gives employees a great opportunity to engage in group work, open discussions and Q&As.
2. Online learning
Online learning could be delivered through a company intranet system or third party video conferencing tool that allows users to upload videos. Delivering training online is a great opportunity for continual learning under different circumstances (i.e during the COVID pandemic) and can also help companies which have limited space.
3. Remote Training
Remote training is ideal for companies that operate across multiple locations. You can deliver training from a central location and distribute the session live to employees watching at different places. If you’re rolling out a company-wide project, remote training could be a cost-effective solution compared to running multiple events at each individual business locations.
What successful in-house training looks like
In the UK’s automotive sector, Stoneacre Motor Group operate an extensive in-house training programme that provides apprenticeships and in-house training for employees working across many different departments. They set up Stoneacre Academy in 2015 to become a fully-accredited school with OFSTED regulation, providing training for sales, IT, management and engineering departments, including apprenticeships for car mechanics. The Academy works with Stoneacre’s 24 franchised manufacturer partners to provide apprenticeship mechanical training on vehicles ranging from the Kia Sportage family-car to the prestigious Aston Martin DB11.
Global industry leader, Amazon, run is another company initiating their own in-house training with a dedicated academy that provides upskill training and professional development for their employees. The Amazon Technical Academy aims to work with 100,000 employees by 2025 with a particular focus on technical skills and software roles. They’ve also announced plans to extend their training academy beyond employees to the general public.
American software company, Yelp, have been known to offer ‘stretch roles’ and ‘stretch assignments’, which set goals and objectives beyond the capabilities of the individual. Stretch roles and assignments can push employees to learn new skills whilst maintaining focus on a specific work task. This seamlessly integrates training with work and can be a great tool to implement personal and professional development.
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