Steps to creating effective learning & development program

People are indeed the heart of any business and essential for its success. Given this, it is vital to have a learning and development plan for your teams also to review your processes regularly. This will ensure that you have a motivated and well-trained workforce, focus on achieving your organizational goals

Training their employees can be a company’s biggest challenge, especially in a rapidly fluctuating business environment. Thus, empowering your people to achieve their full potential can have an immensely positive impact on both the business and your staff. It can also help you attract, recruit, and develop the skilled workers you need for the growth of your organization.

A Learning and Development plan should be intended to inspire, develop, and ultimately support your people to grow. Businesses with trained & competent team members thrive and outperform the competition well.

There are seven steps to developing a coherent, practical, and effective Learning and Development plan:

Step 1 – Evaluate the Training & Development needs of your organization:

Evaluate your needs that you want to address with the training program. It may be a new product that requires a total refurbishing of the production line, or just need some changes to increase the output of an existing product. In both situations, you want your employees to understand and accept the new production flow and increase their in-line productivity.

Step 2 – Define Training Objectives:

The business goal has been defined. Now let’s see how to evaluate the training requirements for this goal. You must be clear about:

The roles and duties of your workforce in achieving that goal; and

The kind of training is required to ensure they can attain these roles and responsibilities.

So defining a training objective is the most essential aspect of the program. It gives a direction to the program and also serves as a gauge to measure success. To put it simply the training will be measured as successful if your employees can successfully perform the tasks they were trained for.

For this to happen,

The objective must be specified clearly and should make sense to everyone involved;

It should be attainable;

It should be pertinent to the training; and

It should be measurable.

Communicate the objectives clearly to your employees and review their understanding of the same through assessments and practical exercises.

Step 3 – Design a Training Program :

Have a blueprint of your plans ready before you put the same into action. A complete plan that includes learning and instructional methods, content, flow, and other such aspects.

Design keeping in mind the requirements of your employees, not the trainer.

Always create content around your training objective

Design using the training principles for a diverse audience

Introduce as many practice sessions as possible

Design an interactive program. Introduce Q & A sessions

Break the sessions into short segments

Ensure proper flow and connection between the sections

Step 4 – Adopt Training Principles diverse audience :

Remember that you are proposing to train adults. The training program has to influence their unique learning characteristics:

Are experienced, self-motivated, and goal-oriented;

Prefer training that helps in their advancement;

Prefer task-oriented and pertinent programs; and

Have experience & pride in their industry knowledge that needs to be respected.

Step 5 – Start developing Training Program :

After identifying the required program for your organization, start developing the design and create your training materials, training manuals, training notes for the instructor, presentations, charts, posters, and other materials for hands-on practical sessions.

Step 6 – Implementation of the training program :

This is where all the groundwork that you have done so far will be rolled out. A few points to remember for effective implementation of the training program:

Schedule training programs well in advance and mobilize the required resources;

Decide the place for the program based on the team size and the kind of training rooms you need.

Step 7 – Evaluate a training program :

Before you can sit back and relax, just evaluate the program, the effectiveness of the program, and the degree of success achieved.

Employee Feedback: Get employee feedback about the program. Was it informative, helpful, and exciting? Do they have any suggestions to make it better in the future? This will help you come up with new and improved program versions.

Employee Assessment: This should be done during the training sessions. Evaluate how many employees have understood the training. This can be done using assessments, quizzes, practical exercises, etc.

Program Assessment: Once your trained employees are back to work, conduct an on-the-job evaluation of the training program to measure its effectiveness in achieving the ultimate goals of the organization.

By creating, maintaining, and monitoring a structured Learning and Development plan HR can identify the training needed to achieve your organizational goals. By monitoring the outcomes of the training program, you can ensure your employees are getting what they need, and you have the best possible team to facilitate ongoing growth.

Thus, creating training and development programs for employees is of huge importance, and needs to be treated with the respect that it deserves. To deliver the desired results, the program requires a dedicated team.

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