A Strategy for Success
Corporate training is in a new era. Gone are the days of ad hoc learning that was only done when it’s absolutely necessary. That’s a practice that just doesn’t cut it anymore. Organizations are opening their eyes to the incredible opportunities training programs have for them. And with the emergence of great technologies and rising interest in the measurable impact of training, the advantages are now more attainable than ever before.
To understand the real benefits and implications, let’s discuss corporate training for your business. We’ll illustrate:
- What it is
- What modern corporate training looks like
- Our tips for success
What is Corporate Training?
Corporate training is the strategy of providing learners, internal and external to your organization, with the skills and knowledge they need to be successful. By furthering their success, you are, in turn, facilitating the success of your business. Notably, this type of training is no longer just about training your employees (although that’s still important), it allows you to reach external audiences - your customers and partners.
Modern Training
With corporate training evolving, the idea of a corporate university is becoming more ubiquitous. This university trains one or more of your audiences with whatever training your business wants to provide, and it’s all done harmoniously. You can also offer certified courses.
Through your university, your learners are automatically awarded certificates after completing a course. It creates a “badge of honor” they’ll be proud of. Here’s an example of a Corporate University, the typical training that’s offered, and the benefits experienced:
- Employee Training: What usually springs to mind when talking about corporate training, employee training is becoming increasingly common. Employee onboarding, product or service training, role training, upskill training, compliance and more, it’s a crucial part of a business’s progress and growth. It’s been shown to increase efficiency, improve retention deliver happier customers and much more.
- Customer Training: Newer on the scene, training customers in a more formal, strategized way is becoming increasingly ubiquitous for businesses. Used to support customer onboarding by training them on how to use a product or service, it's benefits are great. The results vary from reducing customer support queries to improving retention to increasing upselling.
- Partner Training: Done concurrently with your partners and customers or just to partners alone, this type of training is used to prop your partners up for success. Again, it features onboarding, product or service training, and it’s used to build a partner enablement strategy.
How to Develop a Corporate Training Program
Building a corporate training program is a smart move. Starting a formal training strategy for your business can be intimidating, especially if you’ve got a lot of people and audiences you want to train. Here’s some advice on how you can implement one:
Start somewhere
Our biggest tip: start somewhere. If you have multiple types of training you want to deliver, we suggest diving in and starting where you think it will benefit your business most. Perhaps you start by setting up employee training. First, you set up your compliance training, then a 6-week onboarding strategy for new hires, then product training…and so on. It’s gradual, achievable, and builds training momentum.
From here, you can decide the next training and development steps for your organization in a manageable way. Most, if not all, organizations have some form of training happening. But creating a corporate training program formalizes the process. It makes it measurable. Therefore, it’s important to consider how your business is going to take sporadic training sessions and convert them into a more defined training strategy.
How to deliver the training
You have lots of options here. And it’s up to your business to decide what’s best. Here are some ideas:
- Face-to-face/classroom-based training: A more traditional approach, it works well for smaller business looking to train employees in one location. However, it’s not suitable for customer and partner training or easy to manage for businesses with employees in multiple locations.
- Learning management system: Purpose-built to deliver training, an LMS is a scalable and efficient way to deliver training to your employees, partners, and customers.
- Blended learning: A combo of the above two, it’s using traditional training and technology to deliver a more holistic training experience. For example, webinars are a great choice here as you can deliver a more intimate training style at scale to any audience you wish.
Set goals
Implementing training is important, but it’s only valuable when you have training goals to measure its success. With each type of training your business starts to deliver, you need to decide and set achievable goals. For a business implementing employee training, it could be to improve employee retention by 25%.
For customer training, it could be to increase product adoption by 15%. Whatever it may be, make sure it’s a target that you can measure to identify the tangible impact corporate training has on your business.
An eLearning strategy for your business
Great corporate training is all about implementing a strategy that works for you and your learners - whoever they may be! Done right, with the best tools and with training aligned to specific goals, it’s sure to deliver value for your business.
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