Do Your Employees See Learning As A Part Of Their Job?

As a management coach, I regularly meet people at corporate training programs. During discussions, employees often confess the real reason they’re taking advantage of development opportunities, and it’s rarely “to grow and learn.” Their reasons include: they’ve been told that their participation will increase the chance of an early promotion, or their supervisor told them to come.

Many employees view learning as something extra, something to add on top of the regular work to get a promotion. To promote a culture that encourages employee growth, managers need to make employee training an expectation – not an option.

Want to know which is the most effective job training for employees? The best job training happens at work. If you want to encourage continual employee development – that will, in turn, shape your company culture and growth – on-the-job training may be your answer.

Millennial employees want an opportunity to develop knowledge and skills without moving jobs. As an HR, you can customize the on-the-job training employees receive to suit your organization’s evolving needs. On-the-job training and employee development bring a surplus of benefits. Unlike external training and development programs, the opportunities can reflect the future demands of your sector and help you stay agile.

A large part of employee onboarding process, access to company/department information, and even your employee handbook can be better accessed online.

You can use on-the-job training to create a skilled workforce that fits your business needs. Developing a training program isn’t an easy feat. Before you dive in, be sure to know whether the managers in your organization are the best ones to handle the training. Some of the people you’ll need include:

MENTORS

Seasoned employees that are matched up with new employees so they have someone to ask questions to when in doubt.

TRAINING COORDINATORS

The person in charge of the entire training program who will schedule and assign the necessary on-the-job training.

One-the-job training is rarely a one-time event. Periodic training throughout an employee’s career graph is fairly common and necessary. For example, on-the-job training for an entry-level customer care representative might look like this:

• Learning about the company’s vision, mission, and policies.
• How to respond to customers.
• Updates on changes to existing communications systems.
• How new laws affect their line of work and their jobs.
• Refresher course on previous training.

What does great on-the-job training look like?

Here are ways to provide on-the-job training from scratch. It’s important to recognize that you don’t create a program that only caters to your needs. Your employees have expectations too that must be met.

MENTORING

Mentoring is the most powerful form of training and can increase experience, skills, and wisdom to the mentored employee to expand development. It is the key to employee development within your organization.

PROMOTION

A promotion is another powerful form of job training. It forces an employee to grow with the company and is a positive form of employee development.

TRANSFER

A transfer is the fastest approach to employee development that also helps employees accelerate their career path. It provides experience in various areas of an employee’s department or in a new department within the organization. A transfer widens the horizons and enables the employee to gain a broader experience within the industry.

JOB SHADOWING

Job shadowing, whether for a day, a month, or a specific period of time, allows an employee to learn about the job. It is often used by colleges and universities and is an excellent tool for career exploration.

As an HR, you can customize the on-the-job training employees receive to suit your organization’s evolving needs.

WEBINAR TRAINING CLASSES

You’re missing out on a golden opportunity if you aren’t providing online training to your employees. A large part of employee onboarding process, access to company/department information, and even your employee handbook can be better accessed online. Everything that your employee needs to know should be available online. You can choose from myriad sources on any given job-related topic.

So – how do you know whether the on-the-job training is fit your organization?

• It creates a skilled workforce.
• It offers continual training through an employee’s career projection.
• It cares about the betterment of the workforce.
• It is planned to suit your business and its specific requirements.
• It creates a workforce where employees want to stay and you want to promote them.
• It doesn’t waste your organization’s precious time and resources.

Planning an effective on-the-job training program

Even the most effective on-the-job training program will suffer if you haven’t outlined definitive goals to measure whether your employees have improved. Without a definitive goal, you can neither move forward with the plan nor can you review it later. Here’s what an effective on-the-job training program entails:

THE BIG PICTURE

This means that you not only ensure the training program fits the needs of a specific group of employees in specific job functions but that it also suits the overall needs of your company. A successful program should help employees see how they fit in your company’s vision, how critical their role is to the company’s success and why the work they do is important.

THE HUMAN ELEMENT

Success in the job increases employee morale and productivity. You can see spikes in confidence and loyalty as the aftereffects of a successful on-the-job training program.

A MEASURABLE IMPACT

An effective on-the-job training program will most definitely produce measurable results in overall productivity, growth, profit and so on. These are the most important metrics businesses are looking for, so you need to see measurable improvements in these areas if your training works.

It’s quite easy to think that on-the-job training is as simple as showing a new employee the ropes of the business, but that’s clearly not the case. Once you begin to view on-the-job training as a business imperative in which you are building the future of your workforce, it takes on a whole new meaning.

Inability to perform according to training is a clear indication that the training program is failing to yield expected results. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you may have missed something crucial and now you must outline a program that’s different from the existing one.

Part of one’s training is challenging existing learning habits. Old habits take time to change, and it may simply be that an employee needs help figuring out how to create those habits in the most sustainable way. This is especially the case when the different modes of on-the-job training are not put to use; in most cases, employees forget what they had learned.

On-the-job training will cost you time and money, but it’s also an investment into your most valuable asset: your employees.

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