Staff training: ultimate guide to improving employee skills

What is a staff training program?

Staff training is the set of programs a company offers employees to improve their skills and competencies. These programs can vary according to objectives, such as improving digital, communication or other soft skills, depending on the needs of the company.

Thus, there are different programs for staff training, and all are distinguished by a specificity of development and a distinct goal.

Here are some examples:

1. Digital skills development: aim to improve competence in using digital technologies to improve productivity and efficiency.
   
2. Improved communication skills: aim to develop the ability to communicate effectively in the company and with customers.
   
3. Leadership skills development: aim to train leaders who can lead and motivate the team.
   
4. Improved time management skills: aim to help employees manage their time more efficiently.
   
5. Occupational safety and health training: aim to ensure a safe and healthy working environment for employees.
   

6 Budget management skills development: aim to improve the ability to manage the corporate budget effectively.

7 Diversity and inclusion training: aim to help employees understand diversity and create an inclusive work environment.

8 Conflict resolution skills development: aim to help employees manage and resolve conflicts effectively.

9 Emotion management training: aim to help employees manage their emotions and maintain balance in their work and personal lives.

10 Team management skills development: aim to help employees manage the team efficiently and get the most out of the group.

The staff training programs then listed as an example above are not just a list of goals, but require specific pathways, processes and content to be achieved representing the new frontier in HRM.

Standardization of “bench software” gives way to scalable customization

This means that each program requires specific planning, structuring and implementation in order to achieve concrete and tangible results. In addition, as technologies evolve, we are seeing more and more customization of training programs, which are becoming less and less standard products and more and more “modular” programs based on needs .

For example, training programs can be modified over time, compiled and structured according to individual needs, thus creating a seemingly ad personam solution, despite the use of platforms, and getting maximum impact and results from each employee.

This allows companies to constantly adapt to new challenges and needs and always get the most out of each training program.

The question that many professionals in the field might ask at first glance is:

New technologies to reinvent old jobs, the future of HR managers and trainers

the answer is yes if the competitive advantage you can create with a highly customizable solution is a distinctive element for the organization on which to create the market differential, here an in-depth look at the topic with a dedicated article: “make or buy.”

All this can be done differently today with the latest generation of dedicated platforms.

As we have said, therefore, these platforms dedicated to HR and employee experience solutions are very advanced, with an ever-increasing number of features and offer the possibility of creating “modular” training programs, that is, they can be modified over time and customized to meet the specific needs of the company.

Technology is then used to support HR managers and trainers in implementing creative, customized solutions that can help shape HR processes by achieving a unique employee experience.

These types of technological solutions represent an important step forward from the standardization of so many “over-the-counter” software products that have long been on the market, solutions that can often actually prove to be “congealed” over time, limiting the ability to support and respond appropriately to the ongoing need for training programs designed to achieve continuous employee improvement.

Next-generation training technology solutions then allow human resource managers and trainers to take an even more relevant and strategic role, i.e., allow them more opportunity to shape their training projects (thanks to the design methodology BPM business process modeling) and thus more control and return information.

In fact, these solutions make it possible to collect direct and implicit data on user performance and measure the results of their actions; this enables data-driven management, referred to as data-driven.

Want to learn about the benefits of data-driven management and the impact it can have in HR and training?

What are the methods and channels of a staff training program?

There are several methods for developing a corporate training program. Here are some of the most common ones:

1. Classroom method: face-to-face teaching, lectures, workshops, in-person courses
2. E-Learning: online training, interactive learning modules, videos, tutorials, exercises
3. Learning by Doing: learning by doing, working in the field, hands-on experiences
4. Mentoring and Coaching: coaching by an experienced mentor or coach to develop specific skills
5. Sharing Competence: sharing skills among employees within the company in the actual accomplishment of tasks, work groups, presentations, feedback.

HR managers must therefore be able to first identify the growth areas of each employee through talent analysis. Subsequently, they can propose various targeted training experiences To develop these areas, true thematic HUBs.

The employee will then choose the specific training experience best suited to his or her personal growth goals, within a range of possibilities already well defined with respect to his or her goals.

Each resource in this way is left free to move autonomously on what he or she considers most relevant to himself or herself, this approach then allows with appropriate stimuli derived from gamification techniques to engage and direct the employee to make active and informed choices.

This customized training model ensures that each employee receives the most relevant and appropriate training and experience for his or her needs, thereby facilitating the individual’s career growth and development based on his or her GAPs, contextualized within his or her team and work environment.

Why is it important to do staff training in the company?

Staff training is important in business because it prepares workers for the changes in the labor market, which are becoming more and more frequent due to technological development. The skills then that will be increasingly on the list of managers and HRs are the development of:

• Flexibility
• Active learning
• Critical thinking
• Problem-solving skills
• Stress resistance
• Conflict management

Retraining and reskilling employees are essential to maintaining a company’s competitiveness, and training is one means of doing so. In addition, soft skills such as communication and flexibility are becoming increasingly important in a rapidly changing working world. Technology and its applications now generate solutions at an exponential rate thus forcing the workforce to use increasingly high-performance and specific tools….butnecessarily requiring skill upgrading.

This is not an issue that necessarily responds to the ageing problem of the workforce vis-à-vis technology but more simply to a new methodological approach to work in organizations that must now contemplate its use at a deeper level.

Benefits of an employee training program

1. Skill enhancement: through training, employees can acquire new knowledge and skills that improve their job performance.
   
2. Increased motivation: staff training can increase employees’ motivation and satisfaction as it encourages them to grow and develop in their careers.
   
3. Soft skills development: soft skills such as communication, collaboration, and leadership are crucial to employee success and can be improved through training.
   
4. Reduced turnover: investing in staff training can help keep employees motivated and satisfied, reducing the risk of turnover.
   
5. Improved quality of work: training can help develop skills that improve the quality of work and productivity of employees, consequently increasing customer satisfaction.
   
6. Increased innovation: staff training can help develop new ideas and foster a new corporate culture and innovative work environment.
   
7. Adaptability to change: training helps employees stay abreast of changes in the labor market and be ready for new challenges.
   
8. Diversity and inclusion development: staff training can help develop an inclusive work environment that values diversity.
   
9. Growth of career opportunities: staff training can help employees develop the skills and knowledge they need to advance in their careers.
   
10. Improving the company’s reputation: investing in staff training can help improve the company’s reputation as an employer attentive to the needs and welfare of employees.
    

How to create an effective staff training project?

To create an effective staff training project, some important steps must be followed.

Personnel training programs in fact may have certain macro objectives, for example wants to develop the following soft skills in the company:

• Working in teams
• Working under pressure
• Public speaking
• Leadership

Here’s how:

1. Needs: The first thing to do is to understand your company’s needs and the skills gaps you need to fill. This will help you identify areas where you need to focus.
   
2. Employee analysis: Next, you need to analyze your employees and their current skills. This will help you see if there are some areas where you need to develop training.
   
3. Assessment of skills hubs to propose: Once you have identified the needs and analyzed the employees, you need to evaluate the skills hubs to propose. This will help you figure out what kind of training will be best for your employees.
   
4. Define the goals to be achieved: After identifying the skill hubs, you need to define the goals you want to achieve with the training. This will help you target the training project more precisely.
   
5. Define how to measure them in terms of KPIs: Once you have defined your goals, you need to define how to measure them in terms of KPIs. This will help you check whether you are actually achieving the goals you set.
   
6. Use evaluation metrics to check whether you are achieving your goals: Finally, you need to use evaluation metrics to check whether you are actually achieving the goals you set. This will help you understand whether the training is effective and whether you need to make any changes to the project.

Hard skills Vs soft skills, how to consider them correctly

It is important to treat hard skills and soft skills differently when creating a training program for employees, as their characteristics are profoundly different and require different training approaches.

For example, hard skills can be taught through hands-on training sessions and the use of software, essentially developing skills inherent in specific applications that thus require a conceptual scope of maneuvering rather limited to execution.

For soft skills, on the other hand, the concept gets a little more complicated; soft skills turn out to have a much broader scope of use.

In fact, these soft skills influence an employee’s ability to work effectively with colleagues and clients, communicate effectively, and handle stressful and complex situations, we could almost say that soft skills are the real catalyst for an employee’s productivity as they enable hard skills acquired in broadly more shared domains and extensions.

In this logic then, all personnel training programs are very much focused on soft skills as they are considered the real area of maneuver to increase the productivity of employees and their organizations.

the theme then now focuses on a specific goal: how to develop soft skills in the deepest and most lasting way in a steady and progressive way?

Certainly, organizations can afford fewer and fewer in-person training days at agritourism, luxury hotels or spas giving extraordinary experiences to their employees, sure mind you, always memorable initiatives but above all they leave unresolved the problem of systematic development of softskills, their verification and measurement on staff.

The question now is, what tools to use for soft skill development?

In fact, soft skill development requires a path, levels, relationships, persistence and verification to constantly realign employees to the actual state of learning and actual implementation of the new behaviors.

Onboarding in a staff training project.

Every project begins with a good start, onboarding is one of the most delicate phases for any new talent, on the quality of his or her experience in fact will depend much of his or her longevity and work performance in the company.

Creating a staff training program then begins with the onboarding phase , which serves to establish a solid foundation for the future growth of talent within the company.

quality relationships are seen from the beginning

This phase includes defining tasks, relationships within the organization, appointing tutors or mentors to provide support and guidance in business processes, and defining hierarchical and operational roles to refer to.

Onboarding is an important stage because it helps to establish positive relationships and define the relationship between new talent and the company, making the process of operational instruction and basic training needed before onboarding easier and faster.

Being able to take advantage now of platforms for training and employee experience allows for the creation of truly flexible, tiered, and customizable growth pathways that benefit and support each talent, ensuring that the organization capitalizes on the most all opportunities for growth of its new talent and limiting to a minimum, thanks to technology, all possible areas of inefficiency.

It is evident, therefore, that the visibility in the eye of an employee of a concrete path of development and growth has always been a strong element of retention.

How to digitize a staff training program?

The use of technology and gamification in personnel training programs can offer many opportunities to simplify and improve processes for acquiring new skills.

For example, digital platforms dedicated to ‘HR, employee experience, or people management allow online training courses to be planned and taken, which are more cost- and time-effective than traditional courses.

So in essence, the use of HR platforms that support communication, sending feedback and evaluating staff performance provides more opportunities to control and support employees from the moment they join the organization, automating an endless array of otherwise unavoidable activities and operational redundancies.

On the other hand, we are witnessing the increasingly overbearing advent of ‘AI that is changing the way organizations approach employee training. The use of machine learning algorithms will increasingly allow the training experience to be tailored to various factors, such as talent analysis, work context, and each individual’s role and team .

This means that training programs can increasingly be tailored to meet the specific needs of individual employees, making the experience more relevant and increasing the effectiveness of training. AI can also analyze employee performance data to identify areas of strength and weakness, in turn facilitating the creation of new cycles of more targeted training programs.

In summary, AI is increasingly shifting the operational limits of previous digital tools and opening a new frontier of education.

Another disruptive element is gamification, a motivational method based on the principle of making learning more engaging and fun through the use of typical game elements, such as points, levels, challenges and rewards. This increases employee engagement and motivation, improving information absorption and long-term storage.

With gamification, a process of learning and changing habits is made fluid

This concept can be applied to the many forms and tools for training by integrating different tools and technologies such as LMS (Learning Management System), classroom, learning by doing, KMS (Knowledge Management System), podcasting, and others.

In addition, gamification offers the opportunity to test acquired knowledge in an interactive and challenging way, increasing confidence and assurance in using acquired skills. In summary, the benefits are: increased engagement, motivation, absorption and memorization of information, improved skill acquisition, and increased confidence and security in the use of acquired skills.

These are just some of the benefits achievable from staff training programs, which must be planned and monitored through defined goals and evaluation metrics.

Conclusions

In conclusion, the evolution of technologies, HR and employee experience platforms have transformed HR training and development programs .

Digitization then in general has now profoundly changed the paradigm and approach to development programs, discovered new frontiers for the employee experience while simultaneously opening up a new scenario of opportunities for HR and training professionals.

A new scenario full of opportunities for early adopters in HR and training

It goes without saying now that these professional roles will also indirectly experience the conversion to digital with an increasingly deep, pervasive and connected use of these new technologies.

A world of new opportunities to redefine and design the future of training, employee development and organizations as a whole.

HR 360° by Whappy

Whappy HR 360 is a gamification-based employee experience platform that enables advanced HR activities for employee development, from onboarding, mentoring, to staff training and more, a solution that offers a unique and highly customizable way to create effective and engaging training programs.

The platform offers a BPM process modeling mode that allows HR and trainers to create programs specific to each business reality, using an endless array of customizable elements, all easily programmed into the platform under their direct control.

Discover the power of the BPM method to achieve your organization’s operational framework

The combination of gamification and process personalization makes Whappy HR 360 a unique and powerful solution for improving the entire employee experience, from onboarding to learning to employee performance management.

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