Every business owner and senior management official understands that training is an instrumental part of attaining success for your company in any industry, but many don’t know where to begin when it comes to equipping their workers with the know-how needed to survive and thrive in the 21st century. Despite the fact that honing the digital skills of your employees and making sure they have a working environment they can learn in is more important now than ever before, too many businesses are failing when it comes to making training stick for the long-haul.
Here’s how you can make sure your training regime sticks, and the common missteps you’ll need to avoid if you want your workers to remember what you’ve taught them.
The necessity of digital training
Some proponents of old ways of doing business still assert that digital training is a mere sham, worthy of neither the time nor attention of most modern businesses. Nothing could be further from the truth, however; if your business is to avoid getting overtaken by competitors, it’s likely that you need to be upping your digital skill education conferences. Some companies don’t have digital training programs at all, a lamentable but easily remediable problem.
To put it simply, digital skills generate a tremendous competitive advantage for your company that you simply can’t get anywhere else. You should start by reviewing your current level of investment into the digital skills of your workers, and then review the hardware and software you’ve acquired to make your training dreams a reality. You certainly don’t need to invest in shiny new computers or fancy programs every time a new innovation besets the tech market, but you do need to be regularly updating your inventory so your employees aren’t stuck in the 20th century.
After that, you can get down to the real business of making training stick, predominately by mixing training in to real-life scenarios on a daily basis. Whether you’re using digital tools or not, your employees are likely losing much of the training you’re trying to give them the minute they exit the seminar and enter the work cubicle or go home. By incorporating training activities into their daily regimes, you’re guaranteeing that your workers are continuously developing and becoming more efficient.
The best way to go about incorporating training into their day to day activities is to implement a mentor-mentee system wherein your junior employees are paired up with veterans of the company who can show them the ropes. This is especially true if you’re involved in complex training, such as Node JS training where a high level of technical proficiency is needed. The best mentors routinely follow a certain game plan for success, focusing on strong interpersonal relationships and the forging of meaningful ties between management and rank-and-file workers.
You can’t overload your employees
Even if you realize how crucial mentors can be to the success of your training regime, you could still mess things up and waste the time of your employees and money of your company. To avoid this, it’s imperative that you don’t overload your employees with too much training at once. By putting too much of a burden to be constantly refining themselves, you could end up stymieing the long-term development of their workers. To avoid this without giving up on training entirely, you need to be aware of the signs that you’re overtraining your workforce.
Finally, you need to institute a tolerant cultural of learning where all team members feel as if they’re valued employees and have opportunities to grow. Training only sticks if it’s being done meaningfully, and meaningful training in this day and age means enabling employees to not only be more productive but to one day become eligible for promotions so they can work their way up the corporate ladder. If your workers don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, they’ll never be inspired to take training sessions seriously, and will thus squander your training budget while not even improving themselves.
Don’t think this applies to your rank-and-file workers, either. Senior management officials and even company owners need to be involved in the training process, too; if you’re not leading by example, are you really leading at all? Don’t think that “employee training” is something that’s to be relegated to your lowest-level employees, mistaking them for mere cogs to be reshaped instead of human beings to be groomed for success.
By putting people first and focusing on tried-and-tested digital means of success, you’ll turn your company’s failing training regime around in no time. Understand that you need compassion, clarity, and patience to make training stick. By rushing the process or by relying on outdated methods, you’re merely setting your company further back. By following the above tips and always championing a transparent corporate culture that emphasizes learning and growth, your workers will soon be better trained than ever before.
