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6 steps for designing a training program for employees

By Seismic — On December 10, 2021

A new quarter is about to begin. Across the globe, sales teams, customer support departments, and growing companies will onboard new talent in order to help them reach their ever-increasing goals.

If you're like many leaders dealing with ambitious goals, the thought of bringing new hires up to speed might make your stomach churn. Your company's corporate training plan template may be outdated, uninspiring, or ineffective.

Perhaps a litany of spreadsheets form the basis of your employee training plan template—Excel files on Excel files. It's exciting to hire new employees, but the prospect of onboarding them is overwhelming.

If this sounds familiar, you aren't alone. In fact, only 25% of L&D professionals would recommend their own training programs to someone else. The employee training process is a black box with surprisingly few individual development plan examples for managers to reference when creating staff training plan template for their team.

We've worked with hundreds of teams, across a variety of industries, as they develop their list of training programs for employees and use Seismic Learning (formerly Lessonly) to build out lessons, courses, and training paths. Based on that experience, here are six basic steps in developing a training program in an organization that will make new employee training plan templates both effective and manageable:

Target a specific role

It's easy to get bogged down trying to design a training plan that serves every employee at your company. Even if you're responsible for training multiple job functions, don't settle for a generic training plan. Focus on one role at a time, and ensure they get exactly what they need to do their best work.

Define three core functions

Focus is essential to designing a great training plan. You won't be able to teach—and new employees won't be able to absorb—everything at once, so start with the three most important functions needed for success in the role. This will help you build a concise path to productivity for your new hires.

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Determine essential knowledge and skills

Keep your learning focused on the basic skills and knowledge that employees need, rather than including every piece of information that their role might require. The more focused the sample training plan template for employees is, the better their performance will be.

Set topics for recurring practice

If you look at various examples of training plans for employees—the notion of practice is often conspicuously absent. But employees and teams that regularly refresh their knowledge and review essential job skills achieve better performance and business results. Common practice cadences (or intervals) include: weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Some skills likely benefit from more regular practice, while others might only require quarterly or annual review. Regardless of frequency, identify a few items for your employees to revisit and practice on a regular basis—it will pay remarkable dividends.

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Regardless of frequency, identify a few items for your employees to revisit and practice on a regular basis—it will pay remarkable dividends.

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Detail learning systems

Building out the content for each individual employee training plan template is significantly easier with a plan in place. Start by bundling essential skills into a larger grouping, like a class or topic. Doing so makes delivering and managing your learning program more efficient. From there, we recommend a democratized approach in which you identify subject-matter experts across your organization who can help create content. This ensures that employees get training from the most knowledgeable members of the team—and you don't have to create it all yourself!

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It's worth noting, there are many types of training programs for employees. The best results come from a blend of elearning and in-person training. This combination keeps information fresh, saves time and resources, and maximizes impact for your team.

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Measure outcomes

Before you put your learning program into the wild, it's important to decide what metrics will help gauge the ROL (Return on Learning) of your training program. Select both business outcomes (such as ARR, demos set, mean time to resolution, etc.) and learning metrics (lessons completed, quiz scores, etc.) Pick measurable outcomes and KPIs that will help evaluate the success of both your employees and your learning program.

Let us lend a hand

Deciding how to develop a training program for employees is no small feat. That's why we made it simple for you. Our training plan template can help you transform your employee training program.

We wholly agree with Josh Bersin, Deloitte learning consultant, when he says, "The single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization's learning culture." We hope the Training Plan Template will inspire a culture of learning on your team—and drive training that helps your team grow and succeed!