Everyone has a story to tell about their first job—especially when it comes to impactful training. Whether it’s brand training, leadership, compliance, sales enablement, or simply onboarding, we’ve all been there! How was it for you? Did your company turn the tides and provide you with training that really resonated with you? Or was it the same old, run-of-the-mill textbook stuff?
Now, what made it great or boring? What did you like and what did you dislike?
Whether it was a positive experience or something you’d rather forget (maybe you already have), we can all agree that impact lies at the heart of effective training solutions. So, what makes an impact?
This next blog series will dive deeper into the best practices of impactful training—and why programs built around these best practices can reap the benefits, like improved employee retention, better (and measurable) results, and, ultimately, a transformed work environment.
Let’s get started!
Five L&D Best Practices
You may have already seen some entries from us about employee training with impact and why employee motivation matters. At AllenComm, we’re always looking to expand our processes and take L&D to the next level. In the next four blogs, we’ll be sharing the five best practices we’ve come up with over our years of collaboration.
Each step will be covered in its own separate article over the course of the next month, but you won’t have to wait another week to find out more. We’re going to jump right into our first suggestion!
Identify your audience and performance challenges before you begin
Knowing who your audience is and where they’re struggling to meet expectations is critical in developing a custom training formula built with your organization’s needs in mind. Without those guidelines, you won’t even have a place to start!
Start by thinking about your demographic:
- What backgrounds might your employees (or potential employees) be coming from?
- What do you think they find important in day-to-day life? What about in work life?
- What kind of language will make content easy-to-understand and relevant to them?
Unless you can understand who your employees are and what they care about, you won’t be able to fully reach them. It could be that your employees fall under several different backgrounds or generations, so it may take some time to come up with the plan that works best for everyone—or you can explore a more personalized approach based on previous job experience, roles, or other specific learning needs.
Once you have your audience down, it’s time to think about performance. We believe that including performance mapping as part of your main process should be one of the first steps to creating an impactful training experience. Consider the following:
- What motivates your employees?
- What do they need to do? What are the specifications of their role?
- What tasks do employees struggle with the most? What are some of the specific challenges they will need to overcome to reach new heights?
- What do they need to know in order to develop ideal behaviors that prove both beneficial to them in their career and to the organization as a whole?
The answers to these questions will help you identify the measurable behavioral outcomes needed to meet (even exceed) performance expectations.
Finally, the information you’ve gathered can reinforce your training-specific learning objectives, which will act both as a guide for your upcoming training design strategy and also as an indicator of how employees are improving against specified metrics relative to these objectives. The more you know, the more you can do!
Impactful Training Next Steps
That’s one step down, and four more to go! Next week we’ll explore the importance of a mobile, flexible, and accessible training solution that can keep up with the ebb and flow of the technological world. When you set a strategy for training that is compatible with different platforms and usable on the go, you set your employees up for success on their own terms, at their own pace. See you next time!
Subscribe
Related Articles
EPISODE 3: FROM RESEARCH TO PRACTICE
It’s no secret that the L&D landscape is always evolving. [...]
No More Mandatory Fun: Scaling Learner Engagement (Not Exhaustion) in Required Training
Mandatory learning, like mandatory fun, rarely is (learning or fun). [...]
AllenComm at Large: LX Design for Leadership
AllenComm experts actively participate in the larger community of organizational [...]