It’s the start of a new year and the perfect time to start thinking about and planning your employee training programme. For any business, your people are your most valuable asset and the key to helping you achieve your goals. In an increasingly competitive corporate environment, how can you better prepare your team for the future?
Here are some of the corporate training trends that we expect to be seeing in 2020.
1. More Emphasis on Soft Skills
We can often forget that skills such as listening, presenting and communication are essential for a productive and healthy working environment.
The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report suggested that by 2020, complex problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, people management and emotional intelligence would be among the most important skills required in the workplace.
With the rise of automation, artificial intelligence and other advances in technology tasks that require hard skills are likely to decline, making soft skills invaluable in the workplace.
A recent study by Deloitte Access Economics predicts that “Soft skill-intensive occupations will account for two-thirds of all jobs by 2030”.
2. Adaptive Content Delivery
Reusing an old training booklet from 10 years ago in all training opportunities won’t cut it in the modern corporate world, you need to be creating and curating content that’s adaptable to all your employees’ needs.
Think Netflix and provide employees with access to a range of content that they might not otherwise have seen and that they can access when and where they need it. Micro-learning continues to play a huge part in the future of corporate training, providing employees with easily-digested bites of information or instruction that can be immediately applied to a task or project. This type of ‘bitesize’ training will keep the content relevant, interesting, and fresh.
3. Personalised Learning
People prefer different learning styles and techniques and you should be designing training content for each. Visual, logical, verbal, physical and aural there’s no right mix. There is no longer an adequate one-size-fits-all approach that works.
Your employees are coming to you with specific and varied training needs and the training content you provide should reflect this. Employees should be able to pick and choose and opt-in and out of the type of content they access from online resources to workshops you organise throughout the year.
When you’re planning your training think about your employee's specific needs - what are their learning styles? What topics and interests do they engage with and get excited about?
Choosing a flexible training venue layout is also key and should incorporate a variety of types of furniture and arrangements to support both individual and group work and all styles of learning.
4. Using Data to Accurately Track Training
Using data analytics tools to capture the actual ROI of your company’s learning initiatives helps you plan strategically to get the most from your training budget. It’s not the newest trend when it comes to the future of corporate learning, but it continues to be a vital tool that can constantly help you streamline your reporting process and create a bespoke training programme for each of your team members.
In order to properly personalise your training content, you should collect and analyse data to make informed decisions about what will support employees. When employees themselves identify, analyze, and use data from their learning, they become active agents in their own growth and can help set and achieve their goals. When employees are actively involved in their own development they can see where it’s taking them and the value it’s providing.
5. Repositioning Training as a Benefit
Over the past few years, the chalk and talk approach to training has gradually been replaced by a variety of activities. Employee training was often met with employees dreading training days as they saw them as a waste of time. If something is boring or uninteresting employees won’t want to do it. As a manager, you invest time and money in training your employees. You can’t afford to have your employees zoning out during training workshops. You need to make sure that employees feel that they are benefiting from the experience and that it’s providing them with real value that will support their future development and career aspirations.
In the long term if employees feel that they’re benefiting and are really engaged with your training programme there will be increased job satisfaction, morale and employee motivation. Put simply - invest in your employees and they will invest with you.
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