In order for a company’s staff to grow and develop professionally, you have to create a well planned and carefully implemented corporate learning strategy. Having such well-trained employees can greatly affect the return on investment of your business, given the fact that these people can help you reach your goal.

Inside every organization, there is a lot of effort devoted to training, because each and every one of these organizations needs competent people who are able to contribute to the well-functioning of the company. Just to give you an example of how devoted these companies are, according to The Association for Talent Development, the corporate training market in the US is over $165 billion in size. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is that employees improve their skills and actually understand something from the learning management systems.

Here are a few things you should look into when you need to develop a new corporate coaching strategy:

Consider both old and new hires

When it comes to education for employees, there are two types: the one for people who are newly hired in the company and also ongoing education for old employees. It is quite obvious for everybody that new hires need a lot of training because you can’t expect them to immediately adjust to the way your company works. What a lot of people seem to forget, is that old hires also have to continue to grow and expand their knowledge every day, whether those employees are managers or at the general employee level.

e-Learning

Everything in the world right now is heavily becoming electronic, so that is why companies are starting to move away from their outdated learning systems. And even if there are some of them out there that still prefer the old-fashioned way of sitting their employees in a small classroom, most training strategies these days take place online. Companies like IBM are starting to turn off their old systems and build a new learning strategy.

Unfortunately, it is not enough to just deploy eLearning methods and then expect incredible results. The strategy you are using might fail if you do not evaluate it periodically. With that being said, you have to understand that it is crucial for your company to make sure that the eLearning platform works properly and employees actually find it helpful.

Introducing an eLearning platform in your company definitely means faster delivery in training, more flexible delivery than face-to-face training and more effective learning experiences.

Testing

Just to give you an example, this post about testing embedded software from Sam Solutions, talks about how HP suffered $400 million in losses because of poor quality control and lack of proper testing. This unfortunate event made HP rethink their entire development strategy in order to eliminate any problem of writing software that came from employees.

Testing the knowledge of your employees after they completed their online training, or even testing the old members of your company will allow you to figure out if your eLearning platform is worth the investment. And that’s not the only benefit of testing employees, because you will actually have the opportunity to find out what they learned during a specific period of time and give them the chance to improve some of their skills.

Employee feedback

The best people who can appreciate whether your corporate coaching strategy is working or not, are definitely the people who work for your company. Feedback from your employees can help you maintain a healthy work environment, as it gives you the chance to talk directly or indirectly to your employees and see how they grow professionally. After that, you will be able to establish if your education efforts help them or not.

The great thing about employee feedback is that it can mean all sorts of things: surveys, polls or even face-to-face conversation with your staff. You can always ask them directly to explain to you what exactly they learned from their training, if they would like to see some changes when it comes to the online learning platform or maybe to the way the company works in general.

Ongoing evaluation

It is not enough to evaluate your corporate coaching strategy just one time. This should be an ongoing process, as your company should always expand and all the people who work for you should always grow professionally and be able to climb on the corporate ladder.

Be sure to let your employees know that you always expect them to give you feedback on how things work in the company or how is their training going. It is always a great idea to have direct conversations with your employees, especially with the new hires who can give you information on how your eLearning methods help them with their training and adjusting to the way things work in the company.

One of the most important aspects when it comes to the way you handle your corporate coaching strategy is to be ready for constant change, given the fact that we live in a world that moves at a rapid pace and we have to keep up with it, to grow and learn along with it.