A Guide to More Effective Technical Training for Employees.

Training employees is something many companies view as a necessary evil. In an ideal world, they would only hire experienced individuals who already know what they’re doing. But this isn’t an ideal job market. To achieve the results you’re seeking, you have to give your employees the tools and knowledge to succeed.

The Challenges With Technical Training

Employee development and training can be challenging, no matter the content or organization. But when you throw technical content into the equation, it becomes even more difficult to master. From the employer-side of things, here are some of the major challenges:

• Challenging content. Challenging content isn’t just hard to learn – it’s difficult to teach. So any time you have technical curriculum, it’s going to take a highly proficient and educated individual to teach it.
   
• Keeping information fresh. The very nature of technical content is such that it changes over time. As new innovations are brought into the industry and old methods are tossed out, there’s a need to constantly update and retrain.
   
• Variety of learners. It’s fairly easy to design a training program for a group of similar people. But when you introduce different genders, generations, cultural backgrounds, and learning styles into the equation, it’s much more difficult to create a cohesive training curriculum that everyone responds to.
   
• Standardization. When training is spread out across multiple offices, departments, or locations, it’s common to encounter issues with standardizing content and delivering a consistent message.
   
• Engagement and buy-in. No matter how enthusiastic and supportive of training your management team is, it can be hard to rally employees and get them to buy-in. But without engagement, technical training will fall flat.

Technical training is challenging for both sides. But it’s something that you can’t afford to ignore, overlook, or skimp on. Executed appropriately, it will lead to a smarter and better-prepared team of people who can move your business forward in a positive direction.

6 Tips for Better Training

In order to achieve the results you’re looking for with employee training, it’s imperative that you make a commitment to improving your approach. Here are some tips and best practices that experts in the corporate education and learning environment recommend:

1. Establish Core Objectives

No training program – regardless of how basic or technical it is in nature – should be launched without first establishing some goals and core objectives.

Core training objectives can be determined in a number of ways. For starters, pay attention to who is being trained. Are these new hires, or upper-level employees who possess years of experience in their fields?

You’ll also want to think about the content of the training. Are you trying to persuade or inform? Is there room for interpretation, or is the material pretty cut and dry?

In terms of the end goal, you need to know exactly what you want to accomplish at the end of the training. Should attendees be able to put the knowledge into practice immediately, or will there be an adjustment period?

The more detailed your approach is on the front-end, the more beneficial the training will be for everyone involved.

2. Address Multiple Learning Styles

Everyone has a unique learning style – a method through which a person’s brain prefers to process and retain information. You’ll have to address multiple learning styles in your training, while tailoring the overarching approach to what works best for the group as a whole.

As Intelligent Video Solutions points out, “Experiential and immersive learning has a stronger psychosocial influence on cognition. The brain processes the immersive learning experience differently, and the information that is processed is more likely to be recalled at a later time.”

Breathing life into technical material will help people respond to it with greater energy and higher levels of engagement. Do what you can to make trainings immersive and experiential. Video is a great place to start. Activities and hands-on elements also work well.

3. Improve Timing

Timing is something that’s rarely considered, but that should be emphasized more in corporate training. You should conduct training sessions so there’s minimal time between when a participant learns something and when they’re first asked to execute. Too long of a gap will lead to excessive knowledge attrition. Too little time will prevent the individual from being able to process all of the content.

4. Prepare Employees in Advance

If you’ll be touching on a highly technical topic that your employees haven’t been exposed to in the past, it may be helpful to prepare them in advance. Send them preliminary content, publicly available online content, user guides, and other materials. This will serve as a basic primer and should flatten out the learning curve a bit.

5. Get Ready for Questions

“Think about questions you may have to face and prepare their answers,” advises Mary McKinley, a leading trainer in Microsoft (News - Alert) and business applications. “Before delivering your training, inform attendees whether you expect questions during or after the presentation. Finally, when you answer questions, make sure to repeat the question for all to hear, and then answer concisely while keeping eye contact with the questioner.”

In many cases, it’s the answers to questions that provide the best learning material for attendees. Spend time preparing answers ahead of time so that you can ace this element of the training.

6. Prioritize Follow-Up and Analysis

Training doesn’t end when the module, lecture, or session is over. Be sure to follow up with attendees, gather feedback, and conduct analyses of how the training went. This will enable you to optimize your approach moving forward. (Anonymous surveys at the end of training are helpful.)

Take Your Training to the Next Level

You spend too much time, energy, and money on employee training for it to yield a small return. It’s time to revitalize your approach and make this a strength of your business. Take it slow, but really try to lean in and apply a few of these principles. You’ll like the results.