Offering training to employees is critical for driving revenue growth, increasing skills, improving the leadership pipeline, and enhancing employee engagement. Many organizations intuitively know this but finding the time and budget to prioritize training can sometimes be difficult.

To help you get started, here are some key considerations to help you assess your current learning environment and implement a corporate education and development strategy.

STEP ONE – Conduct a Needs Analysis

An important first step in creating a corporate training program is to evaluate your organization’s current business requirements, and then align your learning and development (L&D) strategy to meet them. To do this you will first need to conduct a needs analysis.  

To start the process, below are some questions you can ask internally:

• Are there specific roles or skill sets missing from within your existing team that need to be addressed?
• What is the current problem you would like a training program to help solve? 
• What learning needs to be accomplished, or what skills need to be developed? What would you like learners be able to do after the training that they weren’t able to do before? 
• What would a successful L&D program outcome look like? Increased product knowledge? A more confident sales team? Successfully onboarded new team members?

If the answers to these questions aren’t clear, you can consider developing a pre-training evaluation exam or survey to identify skill or knowledge gaps within your team.

STEP TWO – Develop a Training Program

Once the training needs have been established, it’s time start planning the training implementation. Things to consider during the planning process include:

• Who is the training audience? What is their current knowledge level?
• What is the best way for this audience to learn (live so they can ask questions, in a single session, multiple sessions, or on-demand)? 
• What are your internal training resources and what needs to be outsourced? Are there internal SMEs (subject matter experts) who can teach or consult with during training development? Do they have the bandwidth to take on developing and lead a training program?
• How will the success of the program be evaluated? 

Planning a successful training program involves a lot of coordinating, material development and well thought out exercises to ensure the training is a relevant to the learners as possible. Finding a training expert to partner with can help your organization streamline the program development meet its training goals.

STEP THREE – Planning for Continuous Learning

After the training program is complete it is important to evaluate the success of the program and how it delivered against the learning objectives that were set forward during planning.  Be sure to collect learner feedback to identify ways to future training can be improved.

Opportunities for education are essential to employee engagement, growth & retention. For more information to help you get started and create a culture of learning, click here