According to a recent report from LinkedIn Learning, it is becoming clearer than ever that learning and development must be central to your organization. In fact, 34 percent of employees who left their previous job did so because they believed they weren’t offered enough opportunities for career growth.
Many organizations focus on training when their employees are first hired but don’t realize that they should be developing training throughout the entire employee lifecycle — from the time they are hired until the day they retire. Employees want organizations who invest in their growth through career blueprints and ongoing development.
The key to ongoing training success is designing and championing an L&D program with clear career guideposts and steps to reach each milestone. This helps you create long-term employees who drive measurable business results.
Key areas of training to guide the employee lifecycle
Simply put, the employee lifecycle is the journey an employee takes with your organization from the time they’re hired until their last day of service with you. There are three key areas of training that can help guide an employee through their career at your organization:
- Thorough and effective onboarding, which gives employees the tools they need to succeed from day one.
- Developing soft skills, which provides them with skills they can use wherever their career takes them, from foundational topics like communication to more sophisticated leadership training.
- Upskilling and reskilling technical skills, which give your employees the ability to stay current with the latest technology and organizational processes as they apply to their work.
Throughout the entire employee lifecycle, L&D leaders and their teams should support their organization’s effort to prioritize developing skills that will support long-term employee growth. Such an approach keeps employees engaged and focused on reaching your organization’s goals. In addition, the investment in training at different stages of the employee lifecycle reinforces the value of your workforce and their long-term development.
Starting with a training needs analysis
To fully understand the ongoing training needs of your employees, your organization should begin with a training needs analysis. The importance of a TNA can’t be underestimated because it will help you understand what performance gaps exist and how they can be addressed with targeted training content.
A TNA often begins with a comparison of performance trends and business goals to see how well they currently align. When conducting an analysis, your team should be able to determine:
- Short- and long-term business goals.
- What your organization is doing well.
- What improvements are needed.
By widening your analysis scope to not only include your training goals but also your overall business goals, you’ll discover the most effective course of action and effectively prioritize your learners’ training needs. A thorough TNA will allow your organization to avoid costly mistakes by ensuring training is focused on the right areas.
Your next steps
Once your organization completes a TNA, your L&D team will have the necessary information to create a customized L&D program that addresses your specific training needs. Guide your organization toward adopting a blended learning program, which could include elements of e-learning, virtual reality, augmented reality, instructor-led training, virtual-instructor-led training or some combination. Such a blended learning approach has the potential to engage learners in a variety of ways and keep them focused on new, more targeted learning solutions.
But, as we already know, simply creating an L&D program isn’t enough. You must follow up with your learners once the finite training is complete because the Ebbinghaus “forgetting curve” indicates that learners forget up to 90 percent of what they learned unless a strategy of learning reinforcement is employed.
Learning reinforcement is a strategy that sandwiches formal training with pre-work and post-work tasks (reading informational articles, journaling or printing out a job aid, for example). Pre-work activities introduce training topics and prepare learners for the primary training, while post-work activities solidify the learning by encouraging learners to think about how they’ll apply what they’ve learned to their role.
Such strategies have been shown to improve knowledge retention and help employees put what they’ve learned into practice. It ultimately leads to sustained behavioral change that positively affects an organization.
Fortunately, this process is not something you need to do alone. There are partners you can rely on to help you elevate your organization’s training programs and build career-long educational opportunities for your employees. Once you’ve accomplished those goals, you will see significant improvements in employee retention and will be able to more effectively reach your ongoing business objectives.
