skill development

5 Stages of Employee Training

5 Stages of Employee Training

Leave a Comment / Employee Onboarding, Instructional Design /

When we consider training over the life cycle of an employee, it is clear that not all training is the same. A new employee doesn’t receive the same training as someone who has been around for 1 year or 5 years. The difference is more than just the content that changes, but how the training is done. We’ll take a look a how training might look across 5 successive stages of employee training. We’ll start at onboarding a new team member, all the way until they become community leaders.

5 Stages of Employee Training

Onboarding

No business can succeed without onboarding training. At this stage we are giving learners the basic information to competently (and legally) start work such as workplace policies and safety training. Training now is just like checking things off of a list– one and done.

The focus in this stage is on friendly guidance for the learner and ensuring compliance. We want to keep the content ordered to prevent the learner from getting lost. Managers can use reminders and check-ins to keep the learner on track.

Practice

At this point, we have the basics out of the way and are now training things that are unique to the business. These skills can’t be mastered in one sitting, they will require repetition. Memorizing 50 recipes and being able to execute them on the spot isn’t the same as remembering a descriptive fact.

Practice is ongoing and relatively unstructured; consistent engagement is important. As a result, training content must be bite-sized and easily searched. We might incorporate more interactivity, gamification, and scheduled activities that encourage the learner to stick with it over time.

Change

Businesses don’t stay the same and inevitably we’ll need training that supports change. This might look like promotions, new products, or updated operational procedures. Change for a business usually comes with a timeline. Consequently, training is required to meet this timeline as well.

At this stage communication is critical. Your training department needs reliable avenues to send notifications, reminders, or otherwise grab attention. Tools to specifically report on new content and segment previously complete versus new learners can be a great help.

Career Development

Employees want to boost their skills and advance their careers. In this stage, training is focused on deeper learning topics such as leadership and management. Advanced courses should be available but not required.

We want to provide learning paths that go beyond “normal” required training; either manager or self initiated. These paths should be specialized and rewarding without punishing those who aren’t looking to advance their career yet.

Community Leadership

Veteran employees are valuable parts of every business. Outside of receiving change-related training or advancing their careers, they also have an important role in training. Experienced employees are the drivers of informal learning in a community.

Here, we can focus on providing shared spaces to help newer employees connect with the rest of the team. Initiatives such as mentorship programs or knowledge bases are areas where experienced employees can have a big impact.

Conclusion

It’s easy to feel like training is all about one aspect (onboarding, or career development, or practice) and miss the big picture. However, a mature training program should continually improve all aspects across the 5 stages of employee training.

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Learning Plans that Grow

Learning Plans that Grow in 2023 (Updated)

Leave a Comment / LMS /

A promising trend we are seeing is more and more training departments wanting to create learning plans that grow.

These are learning plans that start off with just a few courses but add more over time based on what the learner needs. This is part of a larger trend in the industry towards personalized and adaptive training.

1. Why

Learning management systems are moving away from the old model of learning content “repositories” where heaps of content is stored and learners are expected to sift through all of it. This ends up confusing and overwhelming new learners who just want to start their job training.

Learning plans that grow start off basic and manageable, maybe only a few orientation courses. No learner should be overwhelmed on day 1 of the job. But training doesn’t end at orientation. Courses become available as the learner completes their current training, requires more skills, or wants more challenge.

2. How

Creating learning plans that grow means designing your training program to accommodate growth using metadata and rules. Go all the way back to your curriculum design—what courses are available to each major role in your company? What is absolutely required at the start of each role? What content is commonly added later? What courses are needed for a team member to advance their career?

In your curriculum, include when and how a learner should receive each course in a new column.

Here are some ways a course might be added to a learning plan:

  • Prerequisites: a course becomes available after another course (the prerequisite) is completed. E.g. product training only becomes available after the necessary forms are signed off.
  • Timed release: a course becomes available after a certain amount of time. E.g. an onboarding training program is broken up into 4 weeks with a course released at the start of each week.
  • Self assigned: learners can find a course in a catalog and add it to their plan. E.g. a learner is interested in advancing their career or switching to another department.
  • Manager assigned: a manager can assign a course to a learner. E.g. a manager wants to promote a team member to assistant manager and wants them to do some introductory management courses.
  • Conditions: a course is assigned if the learner performs a specific action in the LMS such as selecting a certain response in a survey.

Once you’ve updated your curriculum design, it’s time to implement these rules in your training program. Although most LMSs support most the conditions above, they might not support all of them. As is usually the case as an LMS admin, you might have to get inventive with the features you have available.

Growth works best when automated so your design scales with your organization, but certain steps might require a human touch. Managers and instructors need to be able to manually assign courses to learners when they need them.

2. Conclusion

The idea that online training simply means providing a massive repository of learning content for learners to figure out themselves is becoming outdated—learners want to be guided through the training program and be assigned content that matters to them and their career path. This can be achieved with not just tools and technology, but design and planning.

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