How To Support Your Employees’ Training Program Based On Their Career Phase - Part 1

How To Support Your Employees’ Training Program Based On Their Career Phase, Pt.1
Summary: Being a “newbie” at a company is a privilege. At these employees' early career stages, both the employee and the employer, are embarking on the exciting “new hire” journey. Using an LMS can be a powerful tool in the early training stage. Let's see how to decrease that employee churn rate!

Support Your Employees’ Early Career Stages And Reduce Your New Hire Turnover

They say that "you only have one chance to make a first impression". It's true. And not just for people, but for companies as well -- especially in industries suffering from increased employee churn rates.

With an estimated one-third of new hires leaving their position within the first 6 months of employment [1] (at great costs to their companies), you need to entice new employees to your company and to the career prospects it offers.

And what better way to achieve this (assuming you do offer those prospects of course), From the employees' early career stages to the end, starting with pre-employment and induction training and following through with the appropriate training program for every stage of your employee's career?

In the first article of this series, we'll show you how to plan your training program for your employees' early career stages (including their pre-employment evaluation and training) -- and examine how TalentLMS can help with all this.

Ready?

Pre-Employment Evaluation And Training

The best way to reduce your churn rate is not to hire people that aren't a good fit for your company in the first place.

Hiring them, training them through the employees' early career stages, training them, and then having to fire them or watch them leave within their first year is less of an experimental approach and more of an error that your company is better off avoiding.

You'll be paying their salary and absorbing the costs associated with their reduced productivity and novice mistakes, only to let them go, depriving their teams of the help they were hired to offer, and causing further delays and work disruptions.

Studies estimate [2] that losing an employee in the first year can cost more than 230% their salary (with the median cost hovering between 10% to 30% of the annual salary depending on the employee’s position).

A thorough pre-employment skills testing program will help you assess any prospective hires and identify their skill gaps.

Combined with pre-employment training on the required skills, it can serve as an effective screening process to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Online learning can handle both of those steps (the initial employee assessment/skills testing and their pre-employment training at the employees' early career stages).

You can start by collecting the candidates’ own description of their abilities through an online survey or similar means, asking them to detail what they think as their stronger skills (or conversely, skills in which they feel inadequate), and asking them to rank their knowledge and performance in several work-related areas and scenarios.

You can then use your LMS platform’s support for tests and quizzes to compare their self-reported skills with their actual rating on your skill-related questions and to assess their knowledge and performance on subjects related to their job's responsibilities and to the company's goals.

eLearning-enabled assessments are an excellent way to find out what your candidates know, what they think they know, and what the need to learn -- and, above all, whether they are employee material so that you are aware right from the employees' early career stages.

Candidates that made it favorably through the pre-employment skills testing stage but lack some essential skills and knowledge can move on to a pre-employment training program, which will serve as a final assessment of their capacity to learn what's required, giving you another screening option before your hiring decision.

When using TalentLMS, for example, this could be set up as a dedicated Branch (independent learning portal) devoted to your pre-employment training courses. Your pre-employment portal can then have its own learners (your second-stage candidates), and its own individual branding.

Online learning systems that offer both desktop (web) and mobile access mean that candidates can study from home and at their own pace, making it easier for them to commit to their pre-employment training.

It's also easier for you, as you don't have to deal with the costs and logistics of running a traditional classroom-based training program for tens, hundreds or even thousands of people of all kinds of backgrounds and skill levels.

Finally, when it's time for the final person-to-person evaluation, an LMS with support for Instructor-Led training and hybrid learning will allow you to schedule and manage your in-person (or teleconference-based) interview sessions alongside your regular pre-employment training activities.

New Employee Onboarding

After you have settled on your new hires, it's time to welcome them to your company, show them around their new environment, and teach them their new roles and responsibilities at the employees' early career stages.

In other words, it's time for onboarding and induction training your new employees, which is a crucial step to make them feel welcome and to give them a sense of purpose and an awareness of your corporate culture and their career prospects.

In fact, remember that figure we quoted above about one-third of new hires leaving their position within the first 6 months?

Apparently, 58% of them would have stayed if they had completed a structured onboarding process. So, ignore this step at your own peril. Especially since it's so easy to create your own induction program -- if you opt for online training, that is.

Employee onboarding is also the perfect opportunity to inform employees about your customer support policies, harassment laws, industry and environmental guidelines and such -- which, in 2017, you can't afford to ignore.

But, first and foremost, onboarding and induction training are all about getting your new hires productive quickly and have them "hit the ground running", so to speak. This relies on effective training at the employees' early career stages. So, on top of general orientation, some induction training courses might also be in order.

Like with pre-employment training, onboarding gets much easier, and logistically simpler, through the use of eLearning and online training technologies.

Your new hires will be able to begin their onboarding even before they are assigned desks and workstations.

Plus, their onboarding material won't be thrown away and forgotten after their induction, like the printed handouts of yore, but remain always accessible (and searchable) for whenever they need to consult it. And of course, the same material can be copied, reused and updated as needed to onboard future hires.

And while there is dedicated employee onboarding software, the fact is that employee onboarding and induction training is not that different to pre-employment assessment  and regular corporate training, except that it takes place at the employees' early career stages.

The only things that change are the learning material involved and the stage of your employees’ career.

This means that a full-featured LMS, such as TalentLMS, makes perfect sense as an employee onboarding tool whose utility extends beyond onboarding to pre-employment stages and regular employee training.

With its easy-to-use content creation tools and its ability to import all kinds of pre-existing material (Word documents, PowerPoints, PDFs, videos, etc.) your instructors will be able to create induction courses in no time. As an LMS, it also offers tests, quizzes, and surveys to help you access your new hires and their understanding of their orientation material and induction training.

All of this information (and much more) will be neatly available in TalentLMS Reports screens.

This is not only useful for giving you a full insight on your learners' progress but can also serve as a digital record that you have informed your employees of specific regulations and policies in case of litigation (that said, this depends on your jurisdiction, so check with your lawyers).

Finally, as an enterprise-grade LMS, with support for Single Sign-On, REST, xAPI, and thousands of native and Zapier-enabled integrations, TalentLMS will integrate immediately with the rest of your infrastructure.).

And, of course, when your new hires have completed their pre-employment and induction training, TalentLMS will still be there for them to consult and learn with throughout their whole career progress.

Conclusion

This article, the first of a small series, examines how you can best plan your training programs for your employee's early career stages -- namely pre-employment and new employee onboarding.

We've covered pre-employment screening and skills testing, and discussed online induction and new hire training, along with how you can leverage TalentLMS for employee onboarding and induction training.

Stay tuned for the next installment of this article series, where we examine later career stages and their training needs.

 

References

  1. 10 Statistics on Corporate Training and What They Mean for Your Company’s Future
  2. There Are Significant Business Costs to Replacing Employees
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