As a training manager, L&D, or HR professional, you know the value of great employee training. But you also know that great training won’t happen without a plan. Whether you’re looking to build a training plan for a specific new product or initiative, or your planning process needs an overhaul, we’ve written the quick guide companion to help you craft an employee training plan from start to finish.
We’ll cover:
What a training plan is
What you should include in your plan
6 steps to build a new one
Plus – a Continu feature that makes employee training plans accessible and simple!
What is an employee training plan?
An employee training plan outlines the goals, learning objectives, content, and strategies you will use to train your teams. Creating a plan is essential if you want to use training time effectively, give your learners high quality materials, and take a creative approach incorporating different methods.
A training plan can be made for an individual employee, or for a whole team (e.g. Sales, or Customer Experience). The more tailored your training plan is, the more likely your teams will be to engage as active learners – 91% of employees want personalized workplace training!
A good training plan will establish guidelines that will help you choose materials, structure your learning tracks, and evaluate effectiveness. With a plan, you’ll be able to maximize the benefits of training your employees: higher engagement rates, satisfaction, and employee performance.
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What should be included in an employee training plan?
Your unique goals
Be sure that your training plan has one or more goals! You want these to be SMART goals that give optimal guidance and can be easily tracked. Whether your training plan is for a single employee or a whole team, identifying goals and desired outcomes will help you ensure that all the content supports those training goals.
Modules, courses, and content
Decide which courses you want to include in the training plan. Give consideration to how the content supports each learning goal.
If your training plan is for an individual, you can cater specifically to their preferred learning style and personal development goals.
Ways to assess your learners
Assessments are a key part of L&D, and there are so many ways to effectively assess what your employees have learned through a course. In fact, assessments demonstrate whether they have actually learned the material, versus just gone through some training.
A plan to track, report, and analyze progress
With an LMS like Continu, you’ll get real-time reporting and analytics on how your teams are progressing through their training. The feedback helps you to see if your goals have been met, and helps you to improve and modify your training plans for each new group of learners.
These skill gaps may be easy to spot, like all teams needing to learn a new software or tool. Or, feedback like customer satisfaction surveys may have revealed a gap in product knowledge or communication skills that needs to be addressed with training.
Skill gaps can also be identified through performance reviews, focus groups, and on-the-job observations. With specific skills in mind to grow or improve, your training plan will be more targeted and effective.
2. Get buy-in from your learners
Your employees are looking for effective training opportunities. Valuable training opportunities are one of the key reasons why they’ll stay at your company, reducing churn rates.
Research by LinkedIn Learning found that engaged employees are more likely to say that:
“Learning helps me grow and advance in my current role.”
“Learning helps me achieve my career goals.”
“Learning helps me adapt in times of change.”
So, how can you get learners on board with the training plan? In the current market, one main way is to provide upskilling opportunities.
71% of workers who participated in upskilling in their job agreed or strongly agreed that it enhanced their job satisfaction!
As you set objectives and build the training plan, include and promote materials that will teach new and valuable skills to your teams and invest in their career development.
3. Choose and sequence your training materials
Take stock of what training materials you already have, then outline the flow from each module or course to the next to create a learning track. With an LMS to deliver employee training, it’s simple to upload or create content right within the platform and arrange content into sequences with detailed tracking and reporting.
Don’t forget to take timing into account. Pay attention to how long each component should take to complete and the amount of time your learners have set aside for training in their typical week or month.
Be sure that each component of the training plan has some sort of integrated or follow-up assessment, and consider what type of assessment is the best fit to show understanding and mastery.
Consider all possible options to best fit the topic, including quizzes, long-form responses, video responses, branching scenarios, and more.
5. Assign & track employee training progress
Test your training plan with a small group of learners and closely track their progress through each part. Take note of completion rates, assessment scores, and how long learners take to finish each module or section.
This is also a great place to bring in other stakeholders or department leaders to give their thoughts on the content and flow.
The best training plan is the one that actually works! Incorporate the feedback you get from other leaders and from learners to adjust, add, and subtract materials where necessary.
Continue to survey your employees and team leaders to be sure that the training you’re offering is relevant, updated, and helping employees in their everyday tasks.
Then celebrate! You’re helping to make employee training a part of the day that your teams will look forward to and value more than ever.
Using Continu to create an effective employee training plan
At Continu, we developed Journeys to make it simple to build a successful employee training program. Journeys help guide learners through a sequence of training content that all supports a central goal or outcome.
Workshops, learning tracks, videos, files, articles, and SCORM content can all be combined into a complete Journey.
When they log-in to Continu, your learners see a summary page which outlines the goal of the Journey, the sequence content, and requirements to complete the journey.
A visual tracker on the summary page clearly displays where learners are in their Journey and what content will be unlocked next.
Journeys give managers a clear overview as well, with visibility into their direct reports’ progress through the Journey and assessment scores. Once a Journey is created and learners are assigned, managers no longer need to manually remind learners about training or drip feed materials.
Journeys takes the focus off of admin tasks and gives employees a simple and clear overview of their required training. This helps you prioritize what’s most important: providing quality training, improving content over time, and building a culture of learning.
Why Continu?
Maybe you’re reading this and realizing that your current L&D methods or LMS aren’t actually helping you to design and offer great employee training plans.
Journeys makes great employee training plans accessible to busy modern teams.
Emily is a copywriter and content marketer specializing in Learning and Development. Emily is currently based in West Michigan. She loves words, coffee, and walking by the lake.
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