Learn the USPs Of Your Employee Development Online Training Course
Think about one of your favorite products or services. What do you like about it? How does it stand apart from the competition? The answer to these all-important questions sums up their USPs. What would you change about it if you could? Now apply this same analysis to your online training course. Start in your own shoes, then wear someone else’s. What do they want in a course, and how can you offer it to them? Build this process around your own staff. How can you get them more invested in your employee development online training course? These tips will help you determine the unique selling points so that you can promote your homespun product.
5 Ways To Determine Your L&D USPs
1. Ask Your Employees
The goal of employee development is to build your team. You want to give them marketable professional skills so they can do their jobs better. But you want to do it in a way that makes them happy. That way, they’re more likely to keep these new skills ‘within the family’, so they won’t use their newly acquired knowledge to find a better job elsewhere. So how do you make them more employable while retaining their loyalty? Well, start by asking them the unique selling points that appeal to them. Review the online training courses they’ve done in the past. Find out what they did or didn’t like about those courses. Conduct surveys to identify qualities they’d like in a new course, and the exact type of online training course they’re interested in. Get them to specify areas they want to polish, then develop targeted material. That way you can say: "You asked for it, and we listened, here you go"! It will boost buy-in for employee development online training because they got what they wanted. They’ll feel valued and heard.
2. Check Out The Competition
In-house marketing analysis is crucial to any endeavor. Talk to your employees as well as your peers. Build a list of popular employee development courses, both internally and outside your organization. Where possible, do free trials on those online training courses. Your focus is on identifying why people like them so much. Take a targeted approach, zoning into what works and figuring out how to replicate it in your own online training course. Just be careful not to plagiarize.
Once you have a list of course do’s and don’ts, measure yourself against these popular courses. What do they have that yours doesn’t? Can you incorporate some of those techniques? The once your online training course is accordingly tweaked, create a presentation for your own team. Highlight the bits they asked for in your online training marketing course, the bits that appeal to them. But be sure to keep your tweaks distinct. You don’t want to be accused of copyright breaches.
3. Maintain Your Brand Identity
Identity politics aren’t just a social construct. For example, every one can effortlessly recognize the Disney or Coca Cola fonts. Most of us can recognize our favorite song by listening to its first few microseconds. You want your employee development online training material to have the same recognition and consistency. It should employ the characteristics your employees enjoy. At the same time, they should feel that it actually improves their skills. Review your list of USPs regularly. Build a routine of updating your course, both in style and content. The goal is to refresh the uniqueness of your material. It also helps to keep it in line with your brand persona. Turn it into the kind of growth tool that’s specifically tied to your organization. This way, your team feels they can’t get this training experience anywhere else. That’s a plus for your staff retention strategy.
4. Identify Performance Pain Points
Ultimately, your in-house marketing must broach the sore subject of performance pain points. Such as how your course is going to address skill or knowledge gaps that are hindering employee productivity. Your top USPs should clearly outline the real world benefits of your online training course so that employees are more likely to engage. They know what’s in it for them and aren’t just flooded with theoretical applications.
5. Gauge Employees’ Preconceptions
Everyone on your team has their own ideas about training or what it should be. These preconceptions dictate how they’ll participate and what they’ll get out of the experience. Thus, you need to identify their expectations, past training experiences, and opinions that may be hindering participation. Then use the information to develop USPs that address their needs and dispel the misconceptions. For example, a poll reveals that most of your employees had a negative experience in the past. The course didn’t include enough interactive elements and it failed to tackle their individual skill gaps. As such, your USPs should make them aware that this isn’t a repeat of that mistake.
Conclusion
Employee development online training has various stages, and the most important one is buy-in. You can purchase or build the fanciest, most complex and most expensive course in the world, but if your employees refuse to enroll or engage, all your efforts are for nothing. Ask your team what they want to see in a course, then use the data to identify your USPs. Explore competing products that are popular. Dissect them to see what makes them so beloved and translate these qualities for your own brand. Once you know what your employees like, ensure that those features are maintained. Apply smart marketing to show your staff how the online course grows their careers. And remember, their new skills make their job hunt easier. Remind them why they chose to work for you and give them lots of valid reasons to stay.
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