The coronavirus pandemic was a painful reminder to organizations that a crisis can strike at any time. In the midst of the pandemic, corporate training wasn’t a top priority for all companies. Many organizational leaders were doing well to simply keep their business’ doors open. This is especially true for companies that were not prepared for a crisis and didn’t have an accessible corporate training program set up.
Organizational leaders can take what they’ve learned from the pandemic and apply it to employee training. They can prepare today for better corporate training tomorrow, whatever tomorrow brings.
4 Ways to Plan Future Corporate Training
Want to ensure your company is able to train your entire workforce, no matter what crises arise in the future? If so, give these tips a try:
1) Choose a corporate training theme for the upcoming year
Choosing an employee training theme for the upcoming year is a powerful way to prepare for better corporate training in the future. It not only gives your workers an idea of what they can expect from their training experience, but it also makes it easier for organizational leaders to create coherent training that is easy for learners to engage with. The John Maxwell Company stated,
“The theme should help everyone stay focused on targeted outcomes throughout the year and help build a universal language that will connect employees both horizontally and vertically within the ecosystem of the company. Remember to be intentional in how you structure your theme. It should not be overly broad or try to summarize all of your corporate goals in a single effort. Pick a key area of focus and keep all of the year’s training efforts relevant and targeted to the theme.”1
What will your company’s corporate training theme be for 2022? Training Industry2 made some thematic suggestions for 2021, but they could easily be carried into 2022. They include:
- Psychological safety
- Reskilling and upskilling
- Growth mindset and flexibility
- Championing change and proving its value with data
- Diversity, inclusion, and equity
Referring to point four, a contributor to Training Industry said, “In 2021, we will see more training organizations focused on analyzing data as part of their discovery phase with stakeholders. This process will allow us to prove that the performance bar moved. The challenge will be the difference between knowing it and knowing how to communicate it.”
The contributor explained that some companies are focusing on dashboards that can be easily accessed. They are also focused on upskilling their employees in data storytelling, “which is a change management driver for all.”
This is just one example of a corporate training theme that could be helpful to any organization in years to come.
2) Make compliance management easier
Compliance training is critical for today’s organizations. Compliance failure can result in legal issues and put employees at risk of injury or error. Companies must take responsibility to ensure all workers stay up to date with the compliance training they need.
In addition to keeping workers up to date on compliance training, organizations should also create templates for future compliance training courses. The templates could easily be filled in with pertinent content and then added to employees’ individualized learning paths. Also, current compliance courses could potentially be updated in the future.
To keep employees compliant, it is essential that your company effectively manage compliance and certifications. For large companies, this can be a huge challenge and burden to L&D teams and HR departments. Thankfully, an LMS makes compliance management simple.
Are your employees required to complete certain courses or certifications as part of their on-the-job training? Streamline compliance management by tracking certificate completion directly in TOPYX LMS. With TOPYX, you can:
- Manage employee compliance with training requirements, such as HIPAA training
- See at a glance which employees are compliant and which are not
- Generate unique numbering for each certificate and automatically associate expiry information based on your settings
- Track units of Continuing Education completed by each team member and count them towards organizational requirements
- Tailor the appearance of certificates using your organizational branding, and create unique designs for each course
Learn more about TOPYX by requesting a free LMS demo.
3) Enable accessible, remote corporate training
One of the key lessons companies can derive from the pandemic is that employee training must be flexible. The pandemic highlighted the need for flexibility in general - in work schedules and in training. "Before the pandemic, we thought employees asking for 'flexibility' meant working from home,” wrote Kathy Gurchiek for SHRM.3 “But now we realize that what they actually meant was the ability to fit their work into their lives in more manageable ways.” The same goes for training.
Your employees probably want flexible training options. This doesn’t mean they want to be able to complete all their corporate training from home. It simply means they want the option to train from various places, on various devices. For example, if they are adhering to a hybrid work model and they have 20 extra minutes at work, they may want to spend that time training on their laptop. If they work at home and want to work through a compliance training course during their breaks, they want to have the ability to do that. Or if they are waiting in line at the grocery store, they want to be able to get on their smartphone and complete a microlearning module.
To create a truly sustainable corporate training plan that will hold up to any crisis, organizations must make training flexible. They must give learners the option to train from any location, at any time, on any device. To do this, they will need to make mobile learning available.
Does your company offer accessible, remote employee training? If not, make a plan to implement it by researching different online learning platforms. Be sure to demo an LMS before investing in it. Also, don’t forget to ask about the LMS’s mobile learning capabilities.
4) Launch a learning management system (LMS)
This may sound overly simplistic, but implementing an online learning platform, like an LMS, is possibly the most effective way to prepare today for better corporate training tomorrow. An LMS makes all aspects of employee training simpler for both learners and administrators. It not only makes compliance management much easier, but an LMS also enables mobile learning and makes remote training possible. This means LMS training is accessible to all employees, no matter what location they work and learn at.
Another LMS feature that allows companies to prepare for better corporate training is LMS reporting. This feature reveals corporate training trends within an organization. LMS reporting can give L&D professionals and HR workers insights into how to tweak employee training to make it more effective. As a result, a company may receive a better ROI for its investment in training.
TOPYX LMS reporting sets your company up for successful corporate training in the present and future. With TOPYX, administrators can easily navigate reports in their intuitive and customizable dashboard. The dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), helpful for executives and management teams to track progress.
TOPYX LMS administrative reporting tools are versatile and robust. They allow you to:
- Email or export reports in an Excel or PDF format, as well as many other formats
- Communicate facts to executives easily with direct reports
- Quickly pull data on user activity and performance
LMS reporting isn’t just for administrators. It gives learners access to report cards, competencies, and transcripts. This may increase learner engagement. It shows learners how well they are doing with training, which could encourage them to adjust their behaviors toward learning to achieve better outcomes.
TOPYX is a full-featured LMS. TOPYX LMS features include microlearning, blended learning, LMS integrations, personalization, social learning, collaborative learning, gamification, and more. All of these features work together to create exceptional learning experiences for your employees. They can also help you predict corporate training needs and prepare for and plan better training in the future.
Prepare for Effective Employee Training with an LMS
TOPYX LMS takes the guesswork out of creating and delivering corporate training to your employees, even if your workforce is dispersed. It also makes it easy for your L&D team and HR department to pick up on training-related trends and recognize when to make changes to a training course or program. If you want to prepare today for better corporate training tomorrow, TOPYX can help.
Find out if TOPYX is right for your organization by requesting a free LMS demo.
Curious about how TOPYX has helped organizations train their employees during the pandemic? Check out this Case Study to discover how TOPYX increased learner engagement and streamlined training for Convey Health Solutions.
References:
1) The John Maxwell Company. https://corporatesolutions.johnmaxwell.com/blog/5-steps-to-a-successful-corporate-training-plan-for-2020/.
2) Training Industry. https://trainingindustry.com/articles/strategy-alignment-and-planning/5-learning-and-development-themes-to-carry-into-2021/.
3) SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/workplace-lessons-learned-during-covid19.aspx.
