Shift Corporate Training Programs from Expense to Investment

The corporate landscape is constantly shapeshifting. Understandably, organizations may find it challenging to stay ahead of the curve and adjust their workforce in the changing environments. Investing in effective corporate training can drive businesses to adapt to changing learning trends and expand their reach. This can also enable employees to learn the desired skills, accelerate their performance, and boost overall workplace efficiency.

Today, organizations must consider corporate training as an investment in improving employees’ agility and performance and not merely an expense to deliver training at the point of need. For businesses to start treating corporate training as an investment, creating a more inclusive environment that fosters a broader and continuous culture of learning for all is essential.

Do you want to start considering training as an investment and not an expense? Then, you would need to adopt the following measures:

Identify Diverse Learning Needs from the Start

L&D teams or corporate managers used to conduct a training needs analysis independently, without taking employee feedback. They would identify the skill gaps and create a plan to develop relevant training courses to fill those gaps. This approach requires more effort and encourages reactive training by identifying learning needs and then meeting them.

Organizations must shift towards a bottom-up training needs analysis approach to deliver a personalized training experience for all. This helps build a proactive L&D team that identifies potential learning needs ahead of time. They also seek employees’ inputs, understand their needs, and prioritize them to boost the training impact and close skills gaps. This approach is more flexible, personalized, and continuous.

Leverage Workforce Skills and Experience

Organizations hire the best talent that perfectly suits their job roles. They can leverage employees’ required skills and experience by allowing them to collaborate and learn from each other. L&D teams outsource their training requirements which can be a slow, costly, and time-consuming process. This may also affect the business productivity and prevent L&D teams from attaining custom eLearning needs in an agile way.
Including employees’ experience and knowledge may speed up the entire training process. By using a collaborative learning platform, corporate managers and leaders can leverage their employees’ knowledge and create value-added training content to meet the suitable training needs.

Embrace a Culture of Self-development

As per the LinkedIn report, 59% of L&D professionals consider upskilling and reskilling as the top priority for corporate training programs in 2021^[1]. L&D departments embrace continuous learning culture to address diverse training needs and encourage employees to learn more and upskill.
Organizations foster a self-development culture where employees can set their own training needs under the guidance of their managers. This enables employees to fit perfectly in their job roles, improve their skills, and advance their careers while staying happier, productive, and satisfied.

Measure Training ROIs

For organizations that want to consider training as an investment, they need to showcase relevant metrics. Investing in a training platform helps assess the number of courses completed, time taken to finish a training module, performance impact, etc.

Integrating the platform with other tools helps measure the training ROI by analyzing the overall impact of training on employee engagement, performance, and business productivity.

The Final Word

Effective corporate training programs serve as the key to organizational success. L&D departments must focus on achieving improved results that unlock business performance and overall productivity. The key is to deliver results-driven corporate training programs which prove to be a worthwhile investment for the company.

To know more about how you can drive performance and outcomes with training, watch the webinar replay: Aligning L&D with Business Goals: An Outcomes-based Approach.