Training your seasonal employees this year doesn’t have to be so labor-intensive. With the summer fast approaching, camps are filling up, terraces will be buzzing, and hundreds of thousands of seasonal employees will be going back to work.
This means that employers are staring down the hours and hours required to get these seasonal employees up to speed and ready for the influx of customers during the busy summer months.
Training new employees can be a time-consuming process. Managers in retail typically report spending 6-10 hours training new employees, including time spent developing training materials. What if there was a way to cut down both training time and training material development?
Training new employees is much easier with automated eLearning tools. There are many ways to implement a new employee training system. We believe the following five tips can help streamline training processes, save time, and reduce employee onboarding costs.
Guarantee Each New Employee Follows the Same Learning Track
If you train a lot of new employees every season, it can be difficult to know exactly what each learner is learning. You don’t want employees to start their new jobs having undergone different training regimes. To make things worse, monitoring exactly what each individual trainer is teaching is nearly impossible.
As business managers and owners, you need to centralize your learning programs or they will be disjointed, unclear, and confusing. A centralized learning management system allows you to develop specific courses for each department and control the learning track of every new employee. These powerful eLearning tools ensure that each new trainee is getting the specific training they need to be successful as they enter their role for the busy season ahead.
Read More: What is Learning Paths ?
Monitor Retention with Quizzes, Automated Grading, and Instant Feedback
Any teacher knows that once the exams come back, there is a lot of work to do. Grading tests, measuring results, and giving feedback are an extremely time-consuming process. The reality is that testing is a must-have for any training process. To build trust with new employees, it’s necessary for them to demonstrate comprehension of key concepts before entering the workplace.
Fortunately, eLearning tools are capable of making the grading process quicker and easier than ever before. Since they are hosted in the cloud, it is possible to automate the process of quizzing, grading, and giving feedback from anywhere that has an Internet connection.
Of course, there is nothing better than personal 1-on-1 feedback from the trainer to the student. But removing the process of grading multiple choice questions and inputting data to generate progress reports lets trainers focus on the important things such as mentoring, monitoring progress, giving personalized feedback, and teaching.
Read More: Two-Fold Benefit of Using Online Quiz Tool in the Learning Industry
Simple Deployment of New Lesson Plans
If your business takes on a variety of employees with different roles every season, they each need a specialized learning track. Not to mention that your seasonal employee training courses most likely require changes from season to season.
Updating learning courses and ensuring that each role is getting the right information can be tedious and difficult to manage. eLearning platforms make this process much simpler by ensuring that lesson plans are always up to date with current employee training needs.
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Due to their user-friendly design and interface, eLearning platforms make building a new lesson plan or updating an old one easy. Publishing the new plan across your entire operation can be done with the click of a button. Removing the time-consuming process of updating lesson plans for each department frees up time to put real thought into the content of the lesson and the ultimate goal of each training regime.
Access to Professionally Designed Pre-Built Courses
Sometimes designing a training course can be incredibly difficult. Knowing exactly what is necessary when creating learning plans for difficult topics like sexual harassment, drug testing, or business ethics takes a lot of expertise. Understanding these courses can be a daunting task, especially if there are legal questions involved.
The reality is that these topics are important, and your employees need to understand workplace policy on these subjects. For some of these topics, there may even be a legal requirement to make sure new employees understand workplace policy and procedures related to sexual harassment or business ethics practices.
Not every company has an ombudsman or a well-developed HR department to manage education regarding these issues. Fortunately, some eLearning platforms provide pre-built versions of these courses that can be customized to your needs and deployed into your lesson plan content.
These lesson plans can save your business a lot of time and money required to develop a messaging strategy around these complicated topics. Look for an eLearning service provider that gives access to well-designed courses, complete with video instruction, customizable quizzes, and in-depth training.
Read More: 5 Ways to Create an eLearning Course on a Shoestring Budget
Incentivize and Stimulate Rapid Learning with Certificates and Progress Reports
When seasonal employees join your company, you need them to be ready for work and on the field as quickly as possible. A part of motivating new employees to quickly move through the training process is by providing incentives, rewards, and progress reports along the training course.
It’s no secret that for new employees, going through a period of training for a new job can be stressful. Learning a new system, adjusting to a new environment, and building the confidence to perform well and succeed takes time and energy.
New employees who are going through this process do need feedback on their performance, but feedback alone is not enough incentive to encourage seasonal recruits to pay attention and quickly complete training with high marks.
eLearning tools make it possible to incentivize learning progress with certificates and rewards that the new employee can earn over the course of their training. By acknowledging employee progress, you encourage new employees to complete the process quickly while making the training program fun and engaging. Certificates and progress reports give new employees something to take ownership of and compete over.
Streamline Your Seasonal Employee Training Programs This Year
To survive and stay relevant in today’s competitive market, you need to make sure processes across the entire business are streamlined. This rings especially true for businesses that must train many employees quickly before the busy season kicks in.
So many verticals require onboarding new employees at the beginning of the season, from golf courses to restaurants to summer camps. Training to make sure that each new learner knows exactly what they need to do before heading to the workplace can be difficult to manage and execute properly.
Utilize eLearning to aid seasonal employee training and ease the pains that come with monitoring success, grading performance, and deploying learning programs that are specific to each department. Best of all, training employees on difficult subjects such as sexual harassment and business ethics can be simplified with customizable pre-built courses.
If you are preparing for your busy season, pay attention to your seasonal employee onboarding strategy and streamline processes by putting in place these ideas.
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