4 Best Practices For Impactful Training

Creating a meaningful and impactful L&D training for your organization

Employees can only be expected to reach specific benchmarks and know job or company-related information if they have been shown through the training they’ve been given. Designing impactful training and development^[i] programs within your organization is the first step in not only driving efficiency and productivity, but also creating happier, more satisfied employees. Ineffective training can really damage your organization’s bottom line and creates a culture of frustration and unhappiness within your workforce.

Let’s take a closer look at four of the best training and development practices that your organization should incorporate to ensure your employee training truly makes a difference in day-to-day operations.
 
1. Assessing Your Learners and Performance Challenges
Assessing your audience is a critical first step. You need to understand who they are before you can put a training program in place—regardless of what performance challenges you’re trying to solve. More specifically, focus on education backgrounds, work experience, and day-to-day work lives.

Were your learners in a college classroom just a few years ago or has it been decades since high school? Have they just started in their position or have they been with the group for a decade (or more) and know the organization’s values and culture inside and out? Does the nature of their work keep them moving around all day with little down-time, or are they in front of a computer screen most of the day?

All these questions affect the type of eLearning solution that will work best. Try to speak to experiences and offer content in language that’s easy for your learners to understand. Your goal is to make your training feel relevant to everyone. If you’re working with a diverse group, it may take more time to create a training plan that works well for everybody.

Once you know who you’re speaking to, you can then identify the performance challenges^[ii] in which your group struggles. Focus on what your employees are motivated by and what tasks they seem to encounter the most—don’t be afraid to get specific. What behaviors or challenges do your employees need to work on to develop better habits or a more efficient workflow? Showing employees how your training could positively impact their careers—as well as your organization—will go a long way in creating the right tone and impact for the information you’re presenting.

2. Harnessing Flexible Learning Methods
Make your training program as accessible as possible for everyone by designing it for mobile devices^[iii]. By making your training mobile friendly, you’re creating an environment where learners can learn at their own pace and on their own time. Offering a plan that’s mobile friendly and accessible anytime and anywhere means that you’re creating the most effective training—the kind that always meets a learner’s schedule.

You’ll increase your team’s motivation and you won’t have to stop production or sacrifice office hours to have your employees complete their training, which saves money.

3. Implementing Immersive Learning Technology
Everybody loves a great story. But it’s even better when you feel like you’re a part of the action. Allowing learners to interact^[iv] with a story engages them far more than if they’re passively watching information presented to them. Utilize audio and video to create a training program that gives your learners a chance to interact and engage with a subject and you’ll see a major shift in the success and retention of your training.

Interactive gamification introduces an element of competition, offers a bit of a challenge, and employs a learner’s problem-solving skills. Immersive videos give learners a chance to call the shots and decide an outcome in an active learning environment that can also safely present the consequences of a bad choice. With the advent of augmented and virtual reality technologies, learners have more opportunities than ever to interact with the stories behind their training to help them focus on the information and goals that their organization is presenting.

4. Measuring the Results
Incorporating both formative and summative assessments into your organization’s training offers many benefits. Formative assessments present testing points as touchstones for learners along the way—making them more likely to self-assess and review information to ensure they’re prepared for their evaluation—while also helping to break up the monotony of a long course. Summative assessments not only let stakeholders know how their learners are progressing but give an organization the ability to incorporate adjustments and course corrections to their training along the way.

Both types of assessment provide end-user data that is valuable in understanding whether training is effective^[v] as well as how learners are progressing. If a particular lesson isn’t effective, an assessment will allow you to see the issue more quickly and adjust your training to address any concerns.

Follow these tips and you’ll design a training and development program that goes well beyond simply presenting your employees with the information they need to know. You’ll be creating an engaging environment where your employees are actively choosing where (and when) they learn—while also offering stakeholders the opportunity to assess what their employees are truly absorbing and make corrections to the training as necessary.

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