Tailor made training courses
Training and development for staff is one of the key drivers for employee engagement. People inherently enjoy the opportunity to learn, however as we know, participant feedback from generic courses isn’t always flattering. Many businesses make the mistake of scheduling a range of tailor made training courses for staff, without spending too much time thinking about how relevant those courses are. Ultimately, when courses don’t offer real value to participants, it causes frustration among your staff.
One of the best ways to improve in this area of your business is with tailor made training. Employees feel enriched and empowered when they attend training that’s specific to what they currently do. Or even better, training that helps them get where they want to be. It’s also a huge benefit to the business if you can have your staff learning skills that can improve productivity.
Here are just some of the benefits to creating and completing tailor made courses in Australia.
Different courses for different needs
Whether you run a small business or a large corporation, you’ll know that everybody has different learning needs. By providing customised course solutions to your staff, it shows you’re committed to providing them the best platform to succeed in their jobs. However, the problem is, everybody has different jobs and vastly different aspirations. That’s why some generic training courses fall flat, as participants feel it just doesn’t suit their needs.
Firstly, you can customise courses that cover all the basics for a specific department. It helps everybody to reach the same knowledge level. For example, the skills needed in your accounts department aren’t the same as the skills needed for sales. By customising courses you can deliver them based on department, rather than just job title. That way, you also have a great platform for cross-skilling. Consider you had people wanting to move from administration positions into sales. With sales-specific customised courses, you can help people from other departments gain the knowledge they need to advance their careers.
Everyone learns differently
If you could get an honest opinion from every participant of a classroom-based training session, you might find that half of them didn’t enjoy the environment. Likewise, ask for the same feedback from e-learning participants and you’ll probably get the same answer. Everybody learns differently, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
For those who enjoy facilitated training sessions, it will always be difficult to get as much out of self-paced learning. Likewise, some people retain a lot more information when they can simply read the information without the distractions of a facilitated session.
Customised training can cater for all needs. Once you’ve got courses designed exactly how you want them, you can also have them packaged into different learning channels. Online courses, facilitated classroom learning, self-paced e-learning – you can cover it all and keep everybody happy.
Create courses relevant to your business
There’s nothing more frustrating than attending a training course where it’s obvious the trainer has no idea about the business you work in. Now, this might be fine when it’s an external course composed of participants from multiple industries. Think, a Microsoft Office course, for example. The skills required to use Microsoft Excel are no different whether you’re a butcher or an astronaut. But when people attend training that’s supposed to be tailored for their workplace, they expect it to have some relevance.
When you create your own course, you’ve got the luxury of chopping the irrelevant information and keeping what matters. Let’s say for example you want all your staff trained in Microsoft Office. A standard MS Office basics course may cover everything from Word, Outlook and Excel through to PowerPoint and Visio. If your staff never use PowerPoint, why have it included in training? You can also add in specific examples that make the course content feel relevant to the work your teams are doing every day.
Better manage your annual training schedule
With customised courses, you have more control over your annual training schedule. As an example, if you know that every year you have new graduate staff members commencing, then you probably have other staff movements happening around the same time. So, if you’ve cleverly created training packages to give people an introduction to the skills needed in each department, you can simply have these courses booked at the same time each year. That way, anybody changing jobs or looking to change jobs has the opportunity to learn the skills they need.
By placing key courses at regular times throughout the year, you can encourage staff to take ownership of their training and development needs. If you hold project management courses twice a year, for example, staff can look ahead and book themselves in if they think it would benefit their career.
Create customised course solutions for onboarding
We mentioned graduate staff intake earlier, but what about the less regular recruitment that goes on in your business. People leave, move sideways and move upwards all the time. All businesses have new staff coming onboard at one time or another, but have you put a lot of thought into your onboarding practices?
Many companies like to hire people based on the skills they already have, which is completely understandable. But with this mindset often comes a belief that new starters can just hit the ground running with little to no training. Usually, this is problematic and at the very least, makes new staff less productive while they ‘learn on the job’.
Why not create a customised training solution for new staff. It might involve learning particular software programs they’ll need, or it might be something like time management, public speaking or even conflict management. You could essentially put together a training package that delivers the basics across a wide range of skill sets, leaving your new staff inspired and ready to hit the ground running.
Tailor made courses are far more cost effective
Let’s face it, training isn’t cheap. Firstly, there’s the obvious cost of working with training providers, but the cost goes much further than that. Think about the cost of wages for people attending training courses. That’s all time that you’re paying them for, while no work is getting done. It’s a harsh way to look at it, because training and development obviously provides far reaching benefits. But from a pure numbers point of view, training is a costly exercise.
Needless to say, if you’re paying for training that’s ineffective or not relevant for your staff, then a lot of this money is being thrown out the window. Customised training, however, delivers true value to your staff and therefore benefits your organisation far more. Relevant training is always going to be more cost effective than generic training that doesn’t address your employees’ needs.
Job-relevant training improves staff engagement
Nothing is more frustrating than spending time on training that isn’t relevant. Whether it’s a virtual classroom, e-learning or a facilitated training session, nothing makes people zone out more than course content that doesn’t apply to the work they do. While it’s never easy to please everybody, you can at least ensure your people are attending the right training at the right time in their careers.
Tailor made courses in Australia will always be more relevant for your staff, because they’re designed with your unique business in mind. When staff can see examples that are business-specific, it leads to better engagement and more active participation. At the end of the day, your people are the backbone of your business, and if you can tweak your outlook on training and development to better suit their needs, everybody wins. Happier staff are more productive, and more productive staff means better performance across the board.
