Why Your Current Employee Training Doesn’t Work (And How To Fix It) – Part 1

Traditional classroom instruction isn’t enough for today’s workforce

Training your employees is expensive, time-consuming, and often unappreciated. But in an era where employers are quick to complain that a skills gap is the greatest challenge they face in building a successful workforce, the need to train has never been more important.

New technology is constantly being introduced that promises to make workers more efficient and productive – but for many, it’s a struggle to carve out time in today’s fast-paced business world to learn how to use it. HR Dive reports that employees can only allocate about 1 percent of their work time to professional development – the equivalent of about five minutes per day in a typical work week.

U.S. businesses invested more than $70 billion in employee development in 2016. But 40 percent of chief learning officers believe that their company’s learning initiatives are ineffective – and only 12 percent of workers say they apply the skills received from training to their jobs.

There’s no denying that internal training is vital for enhancing the skills of existing employees and bringing new ones up to speed. But new research is proving what workers have been proclaiming for years: while traditional classroom-style instruction may be a useful way to distribute information to your staff, it’s not a great way to make them learn it.

The latest trend in employee training: brief, ‘just-in-time’ opportunities

A shift is beginning in the company learning landscape: moving away from the lengthy, dull, “one and done” classroom training approach to a continuous stream of brief, enjoyable learning opportunities that reinforce new knowledge until it becomes sustained behavior.

Companies are also realizing that learning opportunities can be especially effective when they are “just in time” – providing knowledge at the point of action so employees not only learn the solution but immediately apply it. This type of hands-on training provides context and experience that helps workers retain information.

Follow these three tips to help your company create a learning strategy that’s relevant, effective and engaging for your workforce:

• Spell out the business outcome your training will achieve. The best way to get your staff to buy into spending valuable work time on learning and development is by showing the results it will deliver. Pinpoint what your business needs to achieve and build your training around those outcomes. If you can establish a direct link between the behaviors you’ll teach and an important business outcome, you won’t have to convince your staff to take part.
• Accept that a one-size-fits-all approach won’t Employees from different generations have different learning styles: older generations are used to formal, face-to-face approaches and younger generations learn best from digital, just-in-time solutions. Within these generational preferences are also individual needs for employees with different levels of experience. A seasoned employee requires less background than a new hire, for example, while new protocols will require deep learning for all.

  It’s important for companies to mix a smorgasbord of training options so each learner can choose the path that best suits their needs. That may mean classroom, lunch learning, online, microlearning, mentoring and partnering, and gamification opportunities. Blended opportunities can also satisfy the different learning needs amongst your staff, such as combining on-demand online courses with follow-up lectures in a more traditional classroom setting.

• Discover microlearning. The average human attention span is about eight seconds. So instead of always using training sessions that deliver so much information that it goes in one ear and out the other, make sure you offer focused, bite-sized content that provides just the right amount of knowledge to help your learners achieve a specific, actionable goal. This leads to greater retention and behavior changes from training because people’s brains are given a chance to process new information before they’re overloaded.

  Of course, more in-depth training resources – including that traditional classroom training, if it’s feasible and some workers relish it – should be available for those who prefer immersion.

Whether you are onboarding new employees or upskilling your current staff, training can drive your company’s profitability and productivity … if you employ the right methods. By providing an array of opportunities that appeal to different learning styles – and offering delivery of bite-sized chunks of highly-digestible information – you can foster greater engagement in learning, increase the retention of information, and develop a highly skilled workforce.

To learn more about how to improve your company’s sourcing, training, the candidate selecting, and onboarding processes, contact Karp HR Solutions today for a free consultation.