When it comes to internal training, your team may think of it as some time away from work or a distraction from getting their ‘real’ work done, but it’s important that every member of staff in your business recognises how vital internal training can be to the overall performance of your business.
Internal training is important for fostering employee growth, boosting efficiency, maintaining a competitive edge, promoting a culture of knowledge exchange, and achieving cost efficiency. Embracing these five concepts can drive organizational success and ensure employee satisfaction.
Fostering Employee Growth: Internal training plays a crucial role in nurturing the professional and personal development of employees. By equipping them with the necessary skills and knowledge, it enhances job satisfaction and encourages employee retention.
Boosting Efficiency: Regular training helps employees hone their skills and become more adept at their tasks, which in turn leads to increased productivity and overall operational efficiency.
Maintaining a Competitive Edge: In the dynamic world of business, it’s crucial for companies to evolve and stay up-to-date with emerging trends, technologies, and best practices. Internal training ensures that your workforce remains informed and agile, helping you stay ahead of the competition.
Promoting a Culture of Knowledge Exchange: Internal training cultivates an environment where employees are encouraged to learn from each other and collaborate more effectively. This knowledge sharing strengthens the entire organization by fostering a sense of unity and cohesion.
Cost Efficiency: Investing in internal training can prove to be more cost-effective in the long run. By nurturing in-house talent and reducing the reliance on external training providers, organizations can minimize costs and maintain better control over their training initiatives.
Always Build on Your Employee’s Skills
As a business, you want to make sure you always have the best team possible. And to do this, you need to ensure that you’re allowing your employees to constantly build on their skills and knowledge.
Not providing constant internal training will mean your employees’ skillsets begins to get stagnant and soon your competitors will easily overtake you. You need to ensure that you’re always training your staff in the most up-to-date techniques and knowledge to ensure your business is always at the top of its game.
Personalize Training to Suit Your Company
Managing your internal training offering yourself means that you can custom create the exact type of learning you want your staff to receive. Let’s take a look at just some of the benefits of custom content:
- If you use eLearning, you can brand your learning management system (LMS) to match your company’s branding.
- Include real-life examples from the business in the training to make example scenarios more realistic and applicable to your business.
- You can focus on the exact skills that you want staff to build on.
- You can also update the training whenever you need to. Whether that’s based on staff feedback or to reflect your company’s training goals for the year.
Can be Changed to Reflect Current Company Goals
Deciding on what training to run every year can be a bit of a challenge, but you don’t have to run the same sorts of training sessions over and over again. Instead, look at what your company goals are for the next year and build your training program around that.
Your company goals are a measure of how successful you want to be during that period, and using them as a basis for your training is a great way to ensure that your entire team is focussed and working towards that success in everything they do.
Use Whatever Delivery Methods Work Best
When it comes to internal training, you can make yourself familiar with the types of training your team prefers. This may vary from department to department, or depending on the topic, but you should have a pretty good idea of what training delivery method works for what type of training.
This means you can vary the training delivery method to suit your team’s requirements and ensure your staff are receiving the best learning experience.
This also works well if you have remote teams who work across a number of different offices, as using virtual instructor-led training (VILT) or eLearning would mean they could still complete their training at the same time as other offices, without having to schedule multiple sessions as you might have to with classroom-based training.
Can Make Improvements and Changes Based on Staff Feedback
As we mentioned above, creating your own training content means you will be able to update the content when you need to, and this is especially key when it comes to staff feedback.
You should be asking for feedback at the end of every training session to find out what you did well and what could be improved on. You may also want to ask for feedback from team managers to see if the skills learned in training have had a positive effect on that team’s output or not.
Once you have all your feedback, you can make changes before the training runs again to ensure you are providing the best version of that training possible. It’s important to ensure you are always improving and feedback can help you do just this!
Allow Staff to Work Personal Passions
Internal training is great because not only does it allow you to give staff the capabilities to work on skills they need for their jobs, it also gives them the chance to work on skills they want to improve themselves.
You may wish to offer additional training through eLearning which has a large catalogue of topics that your team can work through in their training time if they wish to. This could be skills that they would like to work on and feel they would improve their roles, but that you haven’t specifically laid out in the personal training plan. This could be things like your Marketing team working on their HTML skills so they can update your marketing website rather than outsourcing that activity.
Encourages Team Building
Not only is internal training good for building knowledge, but it can also encourage team building. Training can allow teams from across the business to mix together when they may not usually interact with each other much. It could also allow remote teams to connect online as part of the training experience and spend more time with their fellow teammates.
Tackle Knowledge Gaps
As part of your internal training planning, it’s a good idea to run a training needs analysis, as this will allow you to see what knowledge gaps exist in your business and then tackle them with your training.
Here are the basic three steps of a training needs analysis:
- Decide on what skills you need your staff to have for your business to be a success. This should be broken down by department and job role.
- Look at the current skills your team has.
- Now you know what skills your team has, you will also know what skills are missing. Compare these against the skills you want your team to have, and you’ve found your knowledge gaps. You can now create a training plan to tackle these knowledge gaps and ensure your team is always high performing.
What is Administrate?
Administrate is a training management system that provides a powerful backend solution for training infrastructure. Built for enterprise use, Administrate is cloud-based training infrastructure that integrates all of your training tools and systems into a single interface. The platform houses, analyzes, and leverages training data to make any sort of training – from internal training to complex, global education and compliance programs – easier, faster, and more efficient.
