As a corporate trainer or human resource professional, it is important that you know when it may be time to provide corporate training in your organization.

High quality and relevant training is the cornerstone of a prosperous organization. When your employees get proper training, it boosts their productivity and satisfaction with their role in the workplace. It also makes them more effective at completing their tasks and boosts their confidence.

You’d be surprised by how good corporate training positively impacts the workplace once you implement it. But this doesn’t just fall into our laps. Understanding the need for corporate training requires critical thinking and expertise on your industry and organization.

But how do we become proactive in anticipating the need for corporate training? It is a never-ending job, but our tips will ensure you can stay accountable for providing relevant training to help your team meet organizational goals.

Below is our guide on identifying organizational challenges anticipating the need for training.

Examine Overall Performance

This is the first, and likely one of the most obvious ways to anticipate the need for corporate training. Consider the ways you track progress in your organization and measure your success. Make sure to examine each department of the organization, not just its entirety. Determine the areas that are successful versus the areas that need improvement. This could be through analytics, sales numbers, customer reviews, or any other trackable way that speaks to your success and helps you stay aligned with your objectives.

All of these components will need to be updated and refreshed every once in a while. However, the areas that show the need for more improvement will help you understand what to prioritize. The key is to provide more focused training on the areas that are lacking and lighter “refresher” training for things that are appearing to be going well.

This can help you specify individual employee’s training needs as well. Some areas for improvement may only require specific training for a small group of employees in the organization.

Communication is Key

The best way to understand organizational challenges is to approach the sources. As someone in a role where you must determine training needs, you should be hypothetically “getting your hands dirty” by examining the workplace. Understand how the organization runs, the roles people play in that, and the deadlines they have to reach. Have employees explain the processes of their day-today tasks to you. Ask them how they feel about the process, and if there are any obstacles or difficulties they regularly experience while trying to get the job done.

You should always be communicating with those who work for your organization. Don’t assume that they understand how everything works, simply ask them. Furthermore, take suggestions about how things could be better. Consistent and transparent communication prevents issues and misunderstandings before their negative consequences come to fruition.  Encourage individuals to tell you where they need assistance, and trust your employees as the experts of their department by taking their feedback to heart.

Alignment of Public/Stakeholder Values

What does your organization’s publics and stakeholders value? And how do your employees align with that in how they do their work? Asking yourself these questions can allow you to seek out opportunities to provide training that strengthens this alignment.

For example, if your publics and stakeholders highly value quality customer service, evaluate the last time you provided this training to your employees, if at all.

If they value transparency and ethics, those are other topics you can examine for formal corporate training opportunities.

By sharing with your stakeholders/publics that you are providing training to your employees that aligns with their values, you will build trust, integrity, and position your organization for long term success. It also familiarizes and promotes these values to your employees, inspiring them to implement them into their work.

This strategy helps build positive relationships across everyone associated with your organization.

Employee Assessments/Feedback

How regularly do you conduct employee performance reviews? These are a great opportunity to not only provide feedback to your employees, but also learn more about potential issues that could be solved with training. Some questions to consider asking:

• What are your biggest challenges in this role?
• Do you have any suggestions on how we can support you in alleviating these challenges?
• What is your feedback on any technologies/software that you use to complete your job?
• What do you hope to learn more about going forward in your role?
• How could we improve communication/teamwork within the organization?

This is a great way to get individualized feedback from your employees based on their specific roles. There may be individualized training needs for different employees or departments, and asking these questions will help you determine those.

Refer to Other Industry Leaders

Consider other organizations that work in your industry. How do they differ from you, and what gaps can you find between yourself and other industry leaders that you could fill with corporate training?

Perhaps they are using a different type of technology or software, or have different strategies for customer service or company culture. If you are seeing organizations in similar sectors or industries find success in ways you haven’t, you may want to consider implementing some of those aspects into your organization, and corporate training is a great place to start.

Evaluate Your Industry as a Whole

Every industry has it own unique standards and regulations for the profession. Consider this for your organization. Are there any topics that need to be trained on to ensure you are meeting the standards/regulations your organization requires? Sometimes these are even required by law. Be sure to look into the rules in your industry/area to ensure you are ahead.

Keep Track of Previous Training Workshops

When was the last time your employees received training? Remember, this is just training with you, but in general. Make sure you are aware of any training any departments received in the last several years at least. Consider a keeping a document with dates and details of any training put on for your employees.

Conclusion

Once you are able to identify organizational challenges with our tips, you can start developing a needs analysis to narrow in on the specifics of your training, such as its overall topic, who will be trained, and what format it will be delivered with (online, in person, etc.) Learn more about conducting a training needs analysis in our previous blog post.

No matter what training program you conclude needs to be conducted, we are ready to help you get ahead on your training content with online and in person training materials on virtually any soft skills topic.

Get started on your corporate training today with our Workshop Training Library!

Posted by Katelyn Roy on December 2, 2021