14 Types Of Employee Training Programs And Their Importance

Training and developing employees is one of the most crucial tasks for an employer. If an employee is a fresher, it becomes all the more important to train them. However, not every training and development program is suitable for every employee; in fact, in a survey by Gartner it was found that 70% of the employees don’t have the right skills to do the job and as a result, the overall growth of the organization falls.

What is an Employee Training Program?

Employee training and development program is a continuous effort made by the organization to boost employee performance and enhance their skills for current market changes. The employee training programs aim to tPain employees in various business skills, such as training customer success managers to use, configure and resolve any issues raised by the customer for the company products and services and also focus on upskilling and reskilling older employees in the organization.

Effective employee training programs help employees perform better at their job and close any performance gaps that arise due to a lack of skills and knowledge. It is imperative to use the correct kind of employee training programs as they result in the effective development of employees.

14 types of Employee Training Programs:

In this article, we are going to discuss 14 types of employee training programs that employers can use to provide better training and development for their employees and increase the productivity of the organization.

New Employee Orientation Training:

New employee orientation training is the process of introducing new employees to their workplace, co-workers, and day-to-day responsibilities that they may have. They are also informed of the organization’s expectations of them. Orientation training is an opportunity to train new employees on soft skills and make them well acquainted with company products and services. Employee orientation training help in both the professional and personal growth of the employees. This not only increases the productivity of the organization but also introduces them to the company culture and increases employee engagement.

Importance of new employee orientation training:

Help improve employee confidence: Freshers will gain confidence about their role and responsibilities as they are constantly trained on the company product and services which help them understand the company’s expectations from them, and motivate them to collaborate with teams to understand more about other roles.
Reduce employee turnover: One of the reasons employee leaves within a few months of joining is their inability to understand the role. They struggle to collaborate with their co-workers, find it difficult to interact with the management, or are not able to set proper goals. Employee turnover can be reduced by proper orientation training where the company can lay a solid foundation in the training and development of the employee.
Improve employee performance: A proper employee training program helps build a solid foundation for company products and services. They focus on building skills necessary for their role and help them work together with their colleague to understand more about their role, discuss the problems faced, and learn how to handle difficult situations.

Team Training

Team training involves training individual employees to increase their skills and knowledge of the job while working as a team to increase team performance. This training helps build relationships among coworkers and improves collaboration and understanding.

Team training aims to improve the following skills:

Critical thinking
Communication
Problem-solving
Ability to delegate
Decision making

Importance of Team Training:

Improve emotional quotient skills: Training employees on skills like running effective meetings, providing proper feedback, communicating, and relating well with others. These skills and EQ help employees achieve the organization’s objective and help them achieve success in their corporate life as well.
Identify weaknesses and cover skills gaps: When you train employees together as a team, employees get an opportunity to identify each other’s weaknesses and strengths and cover up those weaknesses for their teams. These also help organizations in focusing their employee training on these weaknesses and upskilling them. In the long run, these increase competitiveness and push the team to perform better.
Improve company culture: Offering training to the team helps improve engagement, and job satisfaction. It also contributes to the workplace as the organization is equipped to embrace changes, inclusion, and discussion in the workforce.

Senior Executive Training

Training your senior-level executives is as important as training employees or freshers, these leaders influence the shaping of the organization’s culture and growth. They are the ones that drive decision-making, strategy, and development processes. So training these senior executives not only boosts their skills but also contributes to the organization’s success. Training senior executives in skills like strategy planning, decision-making, and leadership equip them with knowledge for leading a team and dividing a big task into simpler tasks for easy completion and reporting.

Onboarding Training

An onboarding training program is done for new hires to familiarize them with all the software and hardware of the company. This training program is different from compliance training and covers only the essentials that are common around the whole company. The length of onboarding training depends on company to company but it helps employees to walk through things they need to know during the early weeks of joining the company.

Importance of Onboarding Training:

Onboarding training helps maintain and enrich the organization’s culture by showing employees what is it like to work in this organization, what are the company’s perks, and introducing them to the team.
Onboarding training help cultivate teamwork, mentorship, and leadership among new hires on an emotional as well as a professional level which also helps pass institutional knowledge to upcoming team members of future leaders.
During an onboarding training program, new hires receive regular guidance and support from their seniors. This makes them feel less anxious about their job and focus on their performance. Less stress also helps them better collaborate with their team and increase their productivity and improve their ability to retain information.
Good onboarding training help attracts new employee through word-of-mouth advertising. New hires often post their onboarding experience on a social platform like Linkedin which not only improves employee branding but shows how the company is invested in training their new employees.

Compliance Training

Compliance training helps train employees on the laws and regulations applicable to their industry. It provides them with advice and guidance on their legal obligation and prevents any poor conduct in the organization. It helps them minimize risk and maintain employer reputations and provides a better workplace.

Importance of compliance training:

Compliance training focuses on laws and regulations for ethical work practices. It is important to maintain proper conduct otherwise it can end up costing companies in fines for violation of law or moral conduct and may face legal action in the process. Non-compliance can also result in organizations losing their license to practice or operate.
It protects employees from any workplace hazards like working on dangerous machines or chemicals in an industry-based business.
Laws and regulations change over time with regular compliance training everyone in the organization remains up to date with current law and also ensures the upkeep of the latest development and HR practices in the current workplace.

Product Training

Product training involves training employees on the company product and services. It is an in-house training that includes all the information about the product and services that employees need to know about to function properly. Depending on the training product, training varies from department to department like sales team is trained on how to sell the products, answers any technical question about the product and informs about the features they provide compared to their competitors, and provides feedback on what customers are looking for.

Importance of Product Training:

Product training helps boost sales team performance as the salesperson has the answer to all the customer problems, knows in and out of the product, and presents the key features of the product.
Other than the sales team, employees also promote the product outside the average sales norm and tell their networks how the product they are using solves most of the problem and at the same time also advocate for your brand.
Product training helps customer success teams in solving customer issues and reducing support tickets. Additionally, if your customer success team provides better after-sales service people are more likely to buy your product.

Leadership Training

The leadership role is a type of soft skill training provided to an employee who has moved from an individual contributor role to a managerial role where they are responsible for managing a team. This training influences their leadership qualities and enhances their people-managing skills. Leadership training focuses on foundational skills like communication, decision-making, and project management. It also trains them in crisis management and guides them in providing proper feedback.

Importance of leadership training:

Leaders who are trained to effectively manage the employees can increase the productivity of their workforce. They properly guide new employees, assess the problem, look into a possible solution, and come up with a plan. They also focus on reporting and measuring the activities of the team and setting expectations and goals for the team to achieve.
Promoting your employee to a leadership role increases their loyalty towards the company. They are more focused on generating revenue for the company and constantly look for opportunities to grow. These also reduce employee turnover and decrease the cost of hiring external employees as fewer people are leaving the company.
Leadership training helps leaders understand risks and make rational decisions to minimize those risks. This training increases their strategic ability and improves their decision-making skills.

Technical Training

Technical training involves training employees in new software and emerging technology. Given the rapid technological advancement, new skills are being added to the job market. If companies fail to adapt to these changes there will a huge skill gap in the organization. This will result in poor employee performance. Therefore, companies need to set up a budget to train employees in specific technical skills like data management and analytics to build core technical skills in employees and master the technical aspect of the job.

Importance of Technical Training:

By providing technical skill training you are boosting the confidence and morale of the employee. You are instilling the skill set necessary to do their job and perform to the best of their ability.
Keeping your employee updated on the latest technical knowledge and advancement will provide them with the ability to assist customer better, leading to a boost in customer satisfaction.
Skilled employees do their jobs faster and better than one without the proper skills. So, providing technical training to new employees help the employee do perform well in their job, make better decision, and deliver good result. They also learn how to manage the company goals and come up with a plan to accomplish them.

Quality Assurance (Q/A) Training

Quality assurance training is formal training in companies with heavy production to establish processes to ensure that the product and services meet the quality standards set by the industry norms. This employee training program provides employees with the skills needed to assess the quality of product and raw materials, check for defects in product and service, and improves the production and acquisition system.

Importance of Quality assurance training:

It is important to train an employee in quality assurance as any product that is not compliant with the production and quality standards can be potentially harmful to the customer; for example, drugs manufactured by the pharmaceutical company should be safe to use before they leave the facility.
Customers always look for good quality products. No one wants to risk their health or life by spending their money to buy a product from a company with poor quality products. This not only decreases sales and revenue for the company but also impacts the employer brand in the long run.

Sales Training

Sales training focuses on training salespeople in skills necessary to close a sale. It includes skills like teaching them sales techniques, using sales navigation tools, product training, and providing product demos. This type of training is critical to the success of the organization as the salespeople are the ones who are directly involved with potential customers and are responsible for closing them as a customer. The employee training program also covers understanding the demands of the employee, providing feedback about the product to the tech or manufacturing team, and helping the marketing team by informing them of the current marketing trends and areas to market their product.

Importance of sales training:

Salespeople are directly involved with the customer so they must have communication skills. Sales training helps foster skills like listening and understanding what the customer wants, asking the right question during demos, and being able to communicate the company values to the customer.
Sales training helps salespeople develop techniques to close sales. This includes activities like understanding the signals of whether the prospects are interested or not, what are they looking for, and negotiating on areas where prospects are likely to become customers.
Not all sales call end up becoming a customer. There are various objections that the sales team faces before closing a deal and an unskilled salesperson might not be able to handle these objections and end up making mistakes. Sales training helps the salesperson face objection and how to handle them. It helps them know what areas people ask about and prepare beforehand to tackle those questions.

Soft-Skills Training

Soft skill training focuses on the personal attributes of an employee and is different from technical training. This employee training program focuses on employees’ unique traits like communication, behavior, conflict management, and problem-solving skills. This employee training program is provided to help employees have better dynamics with their team and improves customer relationship and time management.

Importance of soft skills training:

Soft skills training like communication and problem-solving help employee address their problem and try to think out of the box to solve them. This helps boost the productivity of the employees and improve their quality of work.
Hard skills work better if it is complemented by soft skills. You may know how to do your job better, but if you are not a team player, it takes time to get things done, and your colleagues will have a hard time working with you. Soft skill training develops the integrity and adaptability of the employees and makes them resilient in their job.
Softs skill training help employee learns techniques to manage their day-to-day stress This includes teaching them self-limitation and self-awareness about their job so they won’t have missed deadlines or incomplete projects.

Safety Training:

Safety training is mostly provided in heavy industries that involve physical labor to reduce the number of health and life risk to individuals working in factories. It also reduces potential liabilities to the company. This employee training program includes fire control, lockdown drills, evacuation, etc. Some training programs may be required to maintain licenses or insurance for the employees.

Importance of Safety training:

Safety training provides individuals with work safety and avoids creating risks that may put them or their colleagues at risk.
This help raises awareness and understanding of the workplace to identify, report, and prevent any risk in the factories.
Providing specialized training on how to handle the job when the type of equipment used is hazardous in nature.

Online Training:

Online training is like providing training to employees using online tools like zoom or through LMS platforms over the internet. This training help connects learners to their trainers worldwide and involves asynchronous training like online courses, and videos, and synchronous training like virtual classrooms, webinars, and live interaction with trainers. With a global team working across countries, it gives the employee the flexibility to learn from anywhere, at any time, without any dependency or face-to-face interaction.

Importance of online training:

Saves time and money by reducing the cost of training rooms, travel, and catering and enables employees to use their laptops or mobile phones to complete their training. This also reduces time spent on teaching the same thing again and again by having a pre-recorded video of the training session and enabling them to be accessible.
Online learning provides great employee engagement and retention through online gamification, like, videos and interactive content. This is true for specific training like software training and compliance.
Tools like the learning management system allow you to store all your training materials in one place which can be used as reference material later.
It enables you to learn from people across the globe and provides opportunities to collab and take an active part in industry-related forums and groups to discuss problems and new trends, and learn from others’ experiences.

Diversity Training

Diversity training focuses on providing positive interactions and reducing prejudice and discrimination in the workplace by providing awareness of diversity-focused issues in the organization. This training encourages the employees to interact, understand and embrace people from different backgrounds, races, colors, and many more. This employee training program aims to reduce workplace discrimination and focus on creating a healthy environment to work in.

Importance of diversity training:

Increasing employee engagement by creating an inclusive workplace where trust is built between diverse groups and employees can share their feedback and create a positive environment where they perform well.
Different people have different understandings and approaches to a problem. With diversity training, the organization enables people to share their perspectives and provide a comprehensive solution to the problem. A diversified team learns and grows from each other.
Diversity training builds employers’ brands by sending out the message that you care for your employees and that you are committed to creating an environment where people from diverse backgrounds can work together on equal footing without discrimination of any kind.

Conclusion

There are multiple employee training programs available that cater to the specific demands and goals of the organization. However, implementing the correct employee training programs depends on your organization’s and individual’s requirements. That’s why leaders should focus on taking a strategic approach to employee training and use tools and surveys to identify gaps in the organization. They must implement the necessary training programs to empower their employees.