In the past few years, corporate training has become a megatrend among organizations that aim to boost their intellectual capital, close skill gaps, and advance business transformation to meet the demands of the stay-at-home economy.

Corporate training and its advantages

As few as 27% of CEOs were actively pushing upskilling at work in 2020. However, in one year only, this number soared to 62%. And in 2022, 49% of companies increased their learning and development (L&D) budgets. What makes employee training a worthwhile investment, and how can you take the fullest advantage of it?

Let’s look at it from the CEO’s perspective and learn first-hand tips and tricks from the C-suite leaders who have effectively adopted corporate skills training.

What Is Corporate Training?

Corporate or workplace training is a suite of learning initiatives and methods for educating employees, developing their job-related skills, and achieving organizational growth. It’s part of a broader L&D strategy and is typically managed by the organization’s L&D team.

The types of activities can vary widely depending on whether it’s offline or online training. They may concern such topics as:

• Leadership
• Teamwork
• Communication
• Business processes
• Customer service
• Technology, etc.

Many businesses hire professional corporate trainers. They prepare training materials, conduct courses, and develop workers’ competencies through education.

As of now, such companies as Tesla, Disney, Amazon, Deloitte, and United Airlines, for example, are actively hiring L&D managers and training coordinators.

Key Advantages of Workplace Training

Corporate learning can be highly beneficial for both the company and its employees. Aside from building a more knowledgeable and skilled workforce, it contributes to the following:

“Nourishing” onboarding

Organized training becomes critical for virtual onboarding. It helps better integrate remote workers into the team and company processes. It can boost new hire productivity by 70% and retention by 82%.

Improving employee engagement

Employees participating in professional development initiatives are 15% more engaged in the workplace.

Strengthening employee retention

94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their professional development and learning.

Increasing business profitability

Organizations that invest in comprehensive workplace training increase income per employee by 218% and get a 24% higher profit margin.

Attracting new talents

Workplace training is an attractive company benefit for job seekers. Particularly, 87% of Millennials care deeply about opportunities to learn and develop their skills when scrolling through job descriptions.

All of these factors lead to greater business success. But how can you maximize corporate learning in your company? Let’s see how to do that in the following paragraphs.

Effective Corporate Training Tips from CEOs

Grab the best practices for corporate training shared by chief executive officers and business leaders who have been successfully navigating these waters with excellent results.

1. Develop an employee training program

“An employee training program is a strategic scheme to help your workforce obtain a required learning experience, improve existing skills, or gain new ones,” says Anthony Martin, Founder and CEO of Choice Mutual.

“We have designed such a plan specifically for onboarding insurance agents.

The first week is classroom-style training (CRM, insurance underwriting, processing applications, etc.). The second week is an observation period: listening to phone calls made by senior agents. The third and fourth weeks are dedicated to actual calls with clients under the guidance of a personal coach,” Anthony explains.

To build a well-rounded program, answer the following questions:

• What is the skills gap (measure and analyze it)?
• Who will train (other employees as trainers, you yourself, or invited coaches/instructors)?
• What materials do you need?
• What teaching methods will be used?
• How often are you planning to organize training sessions?
• How will you measure the effectiveness of your program?

Consider the most widespread training delivery methods illustrated below.

The infographic shows that roughly one-third of employers give preference to blended learning (a combination of different methods).

Strikingly, only 50% of companies bother to collect participants’ feedback about their programs. And merely 30% of them use at least one other metric to measure the impact of training.

As for measuring the results of corporate learning, polls and surveys can help you assess the level of knowledge, see the differences between study methods, and receive instant feedback from your workers.

2. Personalize learning paths

You can increase each worker’s engagement level by leveraging learner variability.

“It’s essential to ask your team members how each of them prefers to learn the material,” believes Amy De La Fuente, Director of Public Affairs at Bosco Legal Services.

“Some of your employees may be self-learners. Others may require peer assistance to grasp the material. As a leader, you should also know the core learning styles and personalize training activities in accordance with your employees’ preferences,” she notes.

Amy De La Fuente enumerates the basic learning styles and gives examples of training materials for each of them:

Reader (textual) — articles, ebooks, PDFs, etc.

Watcher (visual) — video conferences, slideshows, or webinars

Listener (audial) — audio courses, audiobooks, podcasts, audio recordings, and the like

Writer (note-taking) — make sure “writers” have notebooks or writing pads to pen everything down

Talker (verbal) — online meetings or web conferences

Doer (kinesthetic) — role-playing games or scenario-based learning

Of course, you can mix those, as most people are likely to have a multimodal learning style.

3. Incorporate microlearning into your corporate training strategy

Here’s what Greg Heilers, Co-Founder of Jolly SEO, says about microlearning, the method he regularly uses for training his SEO team:

“Bite-sized content works the best for employee training. Speaking about the type of microlearning content, a video is the most engaging one. However, consuming the learner shouldn’t take more than ten minutes. Ideally, it’s better to stick to 2—6 minute videos.”

“Other types of microlearning content we’ve been using to train our SEO specialists are PDF tutorials, infographics, presentations, and webinars,” Greg points out.

Additionally, check the must-follow microlearning rules for the successful virtual education of your employees.

4. Use e-training forms, methods, and tools in corporate trainings

72% of HR professionals have already moved their workplace training programs from a face-to-face to a digital format.

Web-based corporate training implies using various forms of education:

• Webinar
• Seminar
• Mobile learning
• E-learning presentations
• Live session on social media
• Virtual course, etc.

Sharing his experience of organizing distance corporate learning for attorneys, Mark Pierce, CEO of Cloud Peak Law Group, recommends the following:

“You can increase employee performance during training sessions and achieve greater results with eLearning automation.

The following tools and software make a foundation for corporate e-training:

a) Learning Management Systems (Bridge, 360Learning, Udemy Business, etc.)

b) Communication tools (video conferencing software, chat, email, or community/group on social media)

c) Content creation tools (graphic editors, video makers, course creators, or webinar builders).”

For example, MyOwnConference is a webinar builder that offers advanced possibilities to make creative, interactive, and exciting webinars for your employees.

5. Make it fun and engaging

In fact, one out of three employees claims that “uninspiring content” is a barrier to effective learning.

Here’s a list of elements that can help you create interactive trainings and engage your workers:

• Ice-breaking questions
• Dynamic elements (videos, animations, gifs, etc.)
• Emotional triggers to grab attention
• Scenarios
• Simulations
• Quizzes
• Fun training games, etc.

Over 67% of employees consider gamified courses to be more motivating and engaging than traditional ones.

“It’s fun and exciting to teach employees through corporate training games,” assures Jake Hill, Founder of DebtHammer.

“These can be role-playing simulations in a game-based format. If you’re looking for a catalogue of such training games, Gamelearn is a perfect solution. It offers such games as Merchants (negotiation and deal closing), Crypt0 (cybersecurity), Lumiere (sales prospecting channels), and many others. It can also help you make a smooth transition to online training and build your own simulations with Editor.

Besides gamification, encourage your employees with rewards, gift cards, or bonuses to improve participation,” he suggests.

The Final Puzzle Piece to Reinforce Employee Training

Surely corporate training is a vital part of any organization’s success and should be taken seriously. It can help employees stay current on industry trends, hone their skills, and enhance their overall job performance.

With a well-thought-out training plan, you can ensure your staff is equipped with the knowledge and competencies needed to succeed.

Last but not least — establish a continuous learning environment. MyOwnConference can help you create automated webinars and schedule your virtual classes in seconds to bring your employee training to the next level.