If there’s one thing the Great Resignation has taught us, it’s that employees are no longer scared to leave a company. In fact, they’re ready and willing to quit jobs that no longer meet their needs.
“The Great Resignation is here, and job loyalty is a thing of the past,” said Victoria Short, CEO at Randstad UK. “The pandemic has changed how some people think about life, work, and what they want out of both.”
Training new workers must be a priority for organizations. More and more organizations are looking for actionable advice on how to train employees. A guide for managers, like this one, should stress the importance of new employee onboarding and new employee training.
Research shows that 40% of employees who don’t receive necessary job training or opportunities for improving their skills will leave within their first year. Millennials had the most significant results in this category; 87% said that access to career growth and professional development is a major contributing factor to whether they stay with their current employer.
Knowing how to train employees and using a guide for managers to learn and implement the best practices for training new employees is essential to retaining your team members.
We hope this blog can be your guide.
Training new hires vs. current employees
New employee onboarding and continuous upskilling show employees that you care about their career development. If your organization has effective training strategies and practices, you’re likely to have happier employees with better and brighter outlooks about their future with your company.
There are a few differences between new employee training and training for your existing employees.
New hires need to learn about the company’s policies, procedures, protocols, hierarchy, and culture, but they also need to understand its products and services thoroughly. Including this information in your new employee training makes new team members feel more confident in their positions.
However, your current employees already know and understand all of that information.
While you can deliver new employee onboarding and current employee training via a Learning Management System (LMS), the content will differ. For example, existing employee training will focus on reskilling and upskilling, while new employees will concentrate on acclimating to their new roles.
What is upskilling?
As a leader, you should have a solid plan for how to train your managers and current employees. For example, upskilling is when employees learn new, advanced skills to close talent gaps, keep up with technology and industry changes, and advance their current career paths.
Using a modern LMS allows employees to work on these skills at their own pace through various learning methods and can involve real-time coaching.
What is reskilling?
The World Economic Forum estimates that 54% of employees will require “significant” reskilling by the end of 2022. Reskilling means teaching new skills so your employees can perform different jobs.
Also referred to as cross-training, reskilling is more cost-effective than hiring new employees. In addition, reskilling encourages knowledge sharing and empowers your employees to collaborate.
Upskilling and reskilling support the following improvements:
- Increased employee engagement and retention
- Better collaboration
- Faster adoption of new trends
- Attracting new talent
5 effective training strategies and practices
Whether training new workers, upskilling or reskilling current employees, knowing the most effective and innovative ways to train someone is a large part of the process. When it comes to training employees effectively, the following strategies work for onboarding, upskilling, and reskilling your team members.
1. Real-time coaching
In a survey about performance reviews, 85% of millennials said they’d feel more confident about their jobs if they had more frequent conversations with their managers about job performance.
Millennials have grown up in the digital age, so they’re used to having immediate access to information. Therefore, waiting for an annual review makes them anxious about what a manager will say. Furthermore, regular feedback allows for real-time adjustments that maximize effectiveness, reduce mistakes, and improve performance.
Using an LMS with coaching abilities gives managers access to individual and team data in real-time. This makes it easier for managers to follow progress, provide feedback, and encourage practice.
2. Mentorship programs
Understanding their career objectives and long-term goals is necessary to develop and retain employees. Mentorship programs are effective training strategies that enable career and leadership development, helping employees gain new skills while engaging with co-workers and managers.
By encouraging a culture of learning and mentorship, companies ensure that their employees actively share knowledge. These valuable relationships help employees feel like they’re part of a community as they learn from other leaders in the company.
3. Microlearning
Overall, our attention spans have shortened over the years.
Younger generations (and even some older ones!) are used to scrolling through social media, watching TikTok videos, and playing games on their phones while waiting in line at the store.
It’s no wonder our brains have grown accustomed to consuming bite-sized content.
So, if this is how our brains process information outside of work, why should we be expected to consume content differently in the workplace? Microlearning delivers short bursts of content that allow employees to learn on their own terms and pace.
Some examples of microlearning content types are:
- Short-form videos
- Tests and quizzes
- Snippets of speeches or music
- Images
- Short phrases, paragraphs, and texts
- Games with simple single-screen challenges
Microlearning techniques vary, but the common theme is that all the content is short. Ideally, a given piece of content takes no more than 5-10 minutes to consume.
4. Gamification
What if learning could be both fun and effective? Games activate the brain’s pleasure circuits, especially when winning, by inducing dopamine release. Gamification not only increases learning interest by inciting healthy competition among co-workers, but playing games make learning fun and boosts retention.
You can also offer rewards, create badges for employees to showcase their accomplishments, or keep track of points company-wide. The added incentive of a prize, even an intangible one, increases engagement, and when employees are focused, they’re much more likely to absorb and retain information.
5. Failing forward
Failure is an essential part of professional growth. Knowing how to train new team members means having a culture that allows them to make mistakes and learn from their failures. Here are multiple reasons why failing forward effective:
- Employees feel empowered to try new things.
- Making mistakes is a great way to grow and gain skills.
- Employees can impart valuable knowledge, opinions, and feedback to their managers and other employees by learning from failure.
- Showing employers that they can learn from their mistakes increases a company’s trust in employees.
In a culture that fears failure, employees won’t feel free to express openly their opinions. Instead, they’ll feel limited in their ability to be creative, grow, and develop.
Exploring various effective training strategies will help you identify a quality LMS that will support your goals and meet your employees' learning needs.
Implement innovative ways to train employees with Unboxed
Want to learn how to train a new employee effectively? Need to upskill and reskill current team members? Unboxed Training & Technology has a solution for you.
Our robust LMS platform, Spoke®, uses all of the latest LMS trends:
- Gamification
- Microlearning
- Real-time coaching
- Robust analytics
- Customizable configurations
- And more!
Unboxed helps organizations make employee onboarding and training interesting, collaborative, entertaining, and effective. Plus, our resources like this blog—how to train employees: a guide for managers—ensure that you’re constantly leveraging the best practices for training new employees.
Contact us today to see how our Spoke® platform can benefit your organization.
Get a demo to see how Spoke® Learning Technology Platform can turn your organization into a hub for Skill Agility.
