How to Make the Most of In-house Training for Employees

27th September 2019 | 3 min read

Labs-How-to-make-the-most-of-in-house-training-How to Make the Most of In-house Training for Employees

How to Make the Most of In-house Training for Employees

Training should be a fundamental consideration for pretty much any business. Without training, employees are liable to stagnate, and your business is unlikely to grow and evolve. An investment in training is an investment in the future of your business.

Fostering an atmosphere of professional ambition and intellectual curiosity in your business through well thought out training can work wonders for morale, engagement and productivity and may even help you to attract and retain top talent. In fact, LinkedIn’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report found that 94% of employees surveyed claimed that they “would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career.

Of course, whatever training programme you develop will need to be carefully planned and tailored to the needs and requirements of your staff and business – a one-size-fits-all approach to training is less likely to engage employees than training that has been developed to suit specific skill sets and objectives. For starters, you’ll need to decide whether to opt for in-house or off-site training.

Why choose in-house training?

There are several fairly obvious reasons to opt for in-house training over off-site. Convenience is clearly a factor – it should be less disruptive to your business and staff often feel more relaxed, comfortable and potentially receptive in a familiar training environment.

In-house training is also likely to be more cost-effective. The per-head cost will almost certainly be less, travel costs won’t be a factor and key members of staff are likely to spend less time away from their usual tasks.

It’s also often true that in-house training can focus more easily on skills and objectives that are relevant to your business, drawing on real-life work situations and examples.

Making the most of in-house training

Thorough planning.
Planning your training is vital. It pays to spend some time determining what sort of training will most benefit your employees. Think about specific roles and responsibilities and consider the knowledge and skills that you regard as most valuable across the business. Are there any glaring gaps that should be addressed?

It’s a good idea to look at the fundamentals before training starts to concentrate on more advanced skills. Ensure that there’s a consensus among key staff and that senior management endorses any proposed training objectives.

Try to ensure that training is targeted.
Make an effort to understand the needs of the staff you’re training and try to ensure that you’re addressing them in a meaningful way. It isn’t always easy to engage employees, especially if training feels generic and only tenuously related to the day-to-day challenges they face.

Encourage the social dimension of training.
Training is ostensibly a chance to help your staff develop their skills, but it can also double as a team-building opportunity that can bring together people from disparate areas of your company and cultivate a sense of shared purpose and social warmth. Consider incorporating social activities into training days – even something as simple as eating together can help to bolster team spirit.

Take advantage of existing knowledge in your team.
Consider asking senior employees to lead training sessions. It can be a great opportunity for high-achieving employees to pass on knowledge and good habits to junior colleagues while developing their own presentation skills. It’s also a chance for them to re-evaluate the skills and methodology they find most valuable and even develop their own training resources.