8 Essential Corporate Training Programs for Every Organization

Companies have been increasing their spending on learning and development steadily for a while now. On average, an employer annually spends about $1300 per employee on learning and development. We know that every business is unique but there are several corporate training programs that every organization must-have for their employees. This helps in building a learning environment that facilitates flexibility, adaptivity, agility, productivity, and scalability. 

Onboarding and Orientation Training 

First off, you must understand that onboarding and orientation are two different processes. Orientation is a part of onboarding wherein employees are introduced to the organization and are informed about their job responsibilities. Whereas onboarding includes charting a path for your new hires to walk on before they completely settle into their roles. 

Onboarding is not just a week-long process, it starts the very day a new hire accepts your offer letter and continues for three months from their date of joining. Developing a comprehensive onboarding process is essential for all organizations to boost retention and productivity among new hires. While onboarding, it is also essential to focus on how your organization supports mutual growth and will help them succeed. IBM reports that new hires are 30 times more likely to leave a company in their initial months if they don’t believe they’ll be able to achieve their goals in the organization. 

Here are a few essentials for your onboarding training: 

• Functional training to help new hires understand the organization’s products, services, clientele, and workplace structure. 
• Information training on corporate plans, business goals, sales initiatives, quarterly/yearly objectives, and more.
• Facilitate meetings with managers and team members to help them understand deliverables and set their expectations.
• Self-paced learning courses for job-specific training.
• Formal courses (if necessary) for guidelines on connecting with vendors and other businesses. 

Compliance Training 

Compliance training is an essential part of every organization. It helps in educating employees about various policies, regulations, and laws. It also reduces compliance risks and safeguards the employees, the organization, and its various stakeholders. 

Primarily, there are two types of compliance training – corporate compliance and regulatory compliance. Corporate compliance entails making your employees understand about industry-specific policies, regulations, and laws. Whereas regulatory compliance ensures that rules and regulations are being followed by your employees. 

Here are a few examples of compliance trainings:

• Safety Training is an essential part of compliance training programs for all organizations regardless of their size and industry. The specifics of training the employees will vary depending on the industry but generally, it includes equipment training, emergency response training, and workplace hazard training.
• Cybersecurity training is another critical part of compliance training programs. With increasing data breaches, it has become necessary for organizations to make their employees aware of the risks and what they can do to stay safe. It also entails informing them about the organization’s security framework and how it operates.  
• Anti-harassment training is not only mandated by law but is also a necessary corporate training course. It helps your employees in identifying harassment and informs them about what they can do if they witness or are subjected to any form of harassment. 
• Ethics training helps your employees get an overview of your company’s values and what they can do to support a healthy workplace environment. This includes informing them about the organization’s accountability structure, how to address conflicts, and assessment training. 

Leadership Training 

As per a report by LinkedIn, leadership and management training is on top of the focus areas of L&D programs in 2022. It is an essential training that every organization must provide to their employees. Leadership training helps managers become more effective in instructing their team members and increasing their overall productivity. It also helps them with goal setting and building objectives for efficient operations. 

Leadership training is more than just improving employees’ strategic abilities, it focuses on making them valuable assets that are able to navigate the everchanging and unexpected market trends. It helps them build a teamwork structure in your organization that better streamlines your workflow. 

Here’s what you need to build a leadership training program: 

• Identify leadership gaps in your organization through a simple evaluation of team metrics and productivity.
• Take note of potential leaders through employee evaluation and ascertain how they are contributing to the growth of your organization.
• Set up goals based on your evaluations to ensure your leadership development program is able to bridge the gaps. 
• Define a training technique that you believe will work for your organization. Since every organization is different in terms of size and operations, the training technique may differ as well. Some common training techniques include training courses for different levels of employees, leader-to-leader development, and group-based training. 
• Measure the effectiveness of the training program you have implemented to ensure your future leaders are responding well to it. Some of the measuring techniques include checking for the number of completions compared to enrolments, keeping track of how many employees got promoted after completion of the training program, and if the employees are implementing what they have learned from the training. 

Product (QA) and Service Training 

Product training entails giving your employees a detailed overview of your company’s product and service offerings. It is important for every employee to take this training; however, it is considered vital for roles like sales, customer service, marketing, and quality assurance. 

Here’s what product training includes for each of the mentioned roles: 

• Product training for the sales and customer service teams should include complete information about the product, its features and functionality, and what value it brings to the customer. They must also be made aware of the entire product cycle from installation to operations. Some other critical aspects such as price points, average ROI, customization prospects, information about upcoming updates, and success stories are also a part of the business training program. 
• Product training for marketing teams will cover everything mentioned above and some additional aspects such as marketable features, information about competitors, answers to frequently asked questions, and promotion plans. 
• Product training for quality assurance will not only require the teams to understand the product and services completely but should also cover inspection metrics, information about auditing and quality testing tools, and the company’s product or service standards guidelines. 

Sales Training

Effective corporate training courses for sales can be the backbone of a productive team and add a lot to the company’s overall success. It helps improve the skills of your sales team and teaches them how to use various techniques, softwares, and tools to get their job done more efficiently. 

Here’s how to create a corporate training program for sales: 

• Map essential skills required by your sales teams through services surveys, reviews, data intelligence, or any other analysis tools. 
• Identify the gaps and weak spots in your sales team. 
• Define a training program that covers all the pain points. 
• Some of the essentials you need to consider while building your training course- 
  • Demonstration skills
  • Communication skills 
  • Drawing a proposal 
  • Customer journey 
  • Client onboarding 
  • CRM 
  • Building customer loyalty 
  • Basics of customer psychology
  • Management skills 

Technical Training 

When you’re looking to build the best corporate training program, it is vital to incorporate technical training. As per a recent study by Udemy, 52% of learning and development professionals consider technical skills the top priority when it comes to building a competent training program. 

Technical training entails teaching your employees about the latest technologies and trends in your industry, and what they can do to adopt them. It allows them to learn the technical aspects of their roles. 

Here’s how you can encourage your employees to take up technical training: 

• Make them understand how it helps their rate of career progression. 
• Enable them to see how the technical skills they gain from the courses will help them do their job more effectively. 
• Have training courses developed by subject-matter experts to increase the value they get from each course. 
• Customize the experience based on how your employees react to the sessions. 
• Build interactive training sessions to keep them engaged throughout the course. 
• Have on-demand courses available for your employees. 

Soft Skills Training 

Another essential aspect of corporate training programs is focusing on personal attributes and how to enhance soft skills needed to perform certain job roles. Soft skills are not only critical to an employee’s personal development but also to organizational development. Skills like communication, problem-solving, and conflict resolution help teams in serving their clients better and work more harmoniously. 

Here’s what you need to develop a soft skills training program: 

• Identify the soft skills that are necessary for your operations, client servicing, and maintaining a healthy work environment. 
• Assess if your employees possess these soft skills through various forms of assessments. 
• Work out a plan to address the need for soft skills training program in your organization and group employees based on the requirements. 
• Set up goals to define a training schedule and build courses. 
• Take feedback from your employees to measure course effectiveness and monitor how the learnings are being implemented. 

Diversity Training 

Diversity training is an effective way to eliminate any form of bias from your recruitment and operations process. In fact, 67% of organizations use trainings to boost their diversity initiatives. It helps employees in facilitating positive interactions with each other and embracing inclusivity. Diversity training focuses on removing any bias based on race, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, physical or mental abilities. 

Here’s how you can reach your workplace diversity goals:  

• Identify the current composition of your company.
• Create goals to target diversity.
• Confront bias through various assessment-based exercises. 
• Build training courses that focus on inclusion and help employees understand the benefits it brings to the table. 
• Build separate, more extensive, training courses for HR and recruitment teams. 
• Monitor your organization on several parameters such as accessibility, communications, policies, opportunities, and partnerships to see if they are inclusive and match your diversity goals. 

When building your corporate training program it is essential to focus on rich learning opportunities that help your employees grow personally and professionally. Empower your employees with an easy-to-use and engaging training platform; check out Auzmor Learn – an intuitive, robust and scalable LMS. 

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