Training managers and administrators have their employee training expectations and goals already before them. These are usually aligned with business objectives, mission, and vision.
But what about the employees’ training expectations?
Well, modern employees also have their share of expectations from the trainings they attend. They expect certain standards of learning, such as access on mobile devices, personalized learning experiences, and the ability to collaborate with their peers. These are genuine needs, and it’s the responsibility of instructors to meet them.
This will ensure that employees learn in an optimal manner and organizations achieve the ROI or return on investment on training & development. Employees tend to become more motivated and satisfied in the workplace when you invest in their learning and growth in a way they prefer. You can ultimately expect career progression and a greater retention rate.
With that in mind, in this post, we look at some of the common corporate training expectations most employees have and how you as a trainer can meet them best.
Continue reading to find out.
Watch: What Is Employee Training?
10 Expectations From Training and Development & How to Meet Them
These training expectations from participants and tips to meet them can explain some of the common things learners anticipate about corporate training programs and how you can fulfill them.
1. Communication of Learning Objectives
In a formal employee training setting, instructors and training administrators are guided by clear learning objectives and goals. They are all investing their time and labor to achieve specific outcomes.
So, it’s natural for learners to expect to know why they’re participating in the program. Ensuring transparency at this stage will help you prevent problems in the future arising from cross-purposes.
How to Meet This Expectation: Clearly define your training goals and communicate them with your learners in advance. You should explain how those goals will translate into improved performance, productivity, and professional growth.
Setting expectations for training with such goals will ensure active participation since learners are clear about the desired outcomes and what’s expected of them to get there.
2. Anytime, Anywhere Learning
Around three-quarters (73%) of employees use smartphones for work-related matters such as checking emails. They prefer to view online training content like short videos and quizzes right from their personal devices. They expect the content to be accessible from any platform on the go in a self-paced manner according to convenient schedules.
The idea is that learning should always be available to them at their fingertips, whether they’re at home, commuting, standing in a queue, or sitting in a coffee shop.
How to Meet This Expectation: Adopt a mobile-first approach because mobile phones are a preferred learning device. Also, use eLearning tools with a responsive design that automatically adjust the content layout based on the type of device learners use. To meet such employee training expectations, you can also deploy microlearning that learners find easy and quick to comprehend.
3. Personalized Experience
Product and service personalization is a trend that many big brands follow these days. It keeps customers contended by delivering their needs based on their specifications and is essential for long-term business success.
Similarly, employees expect to get personalized treatment during training to meet their learning needs. No two learners learn the same way and at the same pace, and so they expect companies to acknowledge this fact and address their unique needs.
How to Meet This Expectation: Let your employees choose their learning paths based on their preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. For this, you can evaluate them through a pre-training assessment test so that it becomes easy to develop a training plan for them.
You can also assign training resources based on their job roles and responsibilities instead of making them sit through courses and tests that aren’t even remotely relevant to their positions. All this will help you meet their specific learning needs.
Watch : How to Configure Your Online Course Settings
4. Ease of Goal Setting
Many employees expect to get some freedom to set short-term and long-term goals for their professional development. Their managers already communicate the larger business goals but employees would want to adapt them to their needs. They may want to focus on this topic more than others or concepts they want to revisit until they master them.
How to Meet This Expectation: One of the best employee training tips to meet such employee training expectations is to let your employees work out their learning goals and milestones and a concrete plan to achieve them within a timeframe. Help them proceed with learning at their own pace. Let them pick training resources and seek support to help them bridge their knowledge gaps.
An employee self-assessment can help them identify the missing links. Equally important is to keep your learners motivated by fulfilling this employee training expectation so that they stay on track and complete their training.
5. Connection to Real-World Situations
The best way to understanding is a few good examples.– Isaac Newton
Keeping content structured, centralized, and easily accessible is fine. But that wouldn’t cut it much unless you attend to the nature of the content you provide. For example, you should never fail to establish the connection between what you teach and its practical applications to ensure that training expectations for participants are met.
Employees know the power real-life examples and scenarios have on their comprehension. So, this is another expectation they have from any training program.
How to Meet This Expectation: If you’re conducting safety training such as OSHA, make sure you show your employees how-to videos and practical demonstrations at the worksite.
They should understand the application of knowledge and skills in the real world. This way, they can relate to different safety situations and what they can do to keep themselves and others safe.
6. Engaging & Interactive Content
This is one of the most common employee training expectations. Learners have come a long way from unidirectional lectures and passive listening in traditional classrooms to interactive models that speak to participants. Learners demand this form of learning, particularly because it’s fun.
These fully stimulate their minds and engage them until the end, and so learners expect more and more of this element in training.
How to Meet This Expectation: You can include videos, walk-throughs, gamification, surveys, polls, and quizzes in your training courses. This will generate and maintain a high interest level that positively impacts knowledge acquisition and job performance.
7. Simple & Effective Training
An equally legitimate expectation of employees from workplace training programs is the need to keep training simple, organized, and clear. They expect the content to be well structured so that they easily know from the beginning what to master and how the information is relevant to the work they perform.
How to Meet This Expectation: It has a lot to do with the services of course creators or instructional designers you take for planning and delivering your enterprise training. Whenever possible, keep the information bite-sized, relevant, and task-oriented. Find out what works best for your learners and what is their preferred mode of learning.
8. Collaborative Social Learning
Online learning can breed a sense of isolation, especially when learners are remote, geographically dispersed, and engaged in asynchronous learning. So, employees often expect to stay connected with their peers and training managers virtually to compensate for the lack of in-person interactions.
This is a genuine expectation that can contribute to a healthy online learning experience.
How to Meet This Expectation: Encourage real-time collaboration between training participants through a social learning forum. Include social or group activities to promote collaboration and teamwork. Some of the best LMS systems support online collaboration tools.
You can also encourage collaborative learning on social networking sites where people spend a significant amount of their time today.
9. Ongoing Support
You can’t expect employees to go it alone, especially when you’re training new hires. Assigning online training courses is just one part of the program. Learners expect ongoing support from their trainers since they need help from time to time.
How to Meet This Expectation: The support can be in the form of a knowledge base, mentorship, regular check-ins and feedback, social learning, and other methods. The key is to give your employees all the assistance they need to realize maximum benefit from your online courses and other training resources.
Such support is also vital to ensure a higher participation rate in any corporate training.
Watch: How to Mentor Employees
10. Opportunities for Continuing Education
94% of employees would stay longer in an organization if it invested in their learning.
Employees expect continuous online education and training in addition to onboarding training. This is because they want professional growth or career advancement to stay relevant and current with their job role and industry.
Recurring training can be in the form of technology training or compliance training.
How to Meet This Expectation: Train your employees on fast-changing compliance laws and regulations. This will keep them abreast of industry mandates such as safety rules and data security measures to fulfill their expectations during training and after.
Similarly, you can train them on technical skills and product knowledge to keep them productive in the workplace. This will keep them motivated and make them feel valued.
Deliver On Your Employees’ Expectations
Are you consistently meeting your staff training expectations? Are they able to acquire the right knowledge and skills that their job roles demand? Do your employees feel satisfied and happy with your training programs?
These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself once in a while.
Our employee expectation list must have given you a fair idea of what most employees want from their L&D programs and what you can possibly do to deliver them.
When employees get to learn what they want to learn the way they want to learn, the results will invariably be amazing as it fulfils the employee training expectations to the core.
That’s why you should provide them a learning environment that supports and promotes their preferences, whether it’s anytime, anywhere learning, personalized learning, or interactive content. A good LMS can help you here by meeting all such needs and employees’ expectations of a training course.
Only then can you keep your employees contended, retain them, and achieve training ROI.
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