How to Enhance your Employee Training and Development with Cloud HR
It’s widely accepted that employee training and development are essential for both employees and employers. In fact a recent survey found 86% of employees say job training is important to them. Without effective training programs in place, in the short term you run into problems such as talent stagnating or moving on (over half of younger workers would be incentivised to switch jobs by better training), as well as a decrease in business efficiency and productivity. Longer-term, businesses can miss out on the highly effective nurturing of talent for future leadership roles to shape them in years to come.
Part of what we do at TalenTeam is allowing businesses to make the most out of the tools available, and for modern businesses that means cloud HR systems such as SAP SuccessFactors, and the learning capabilities these include. In this post we’ll take a brief look at how you can enhance and benefit from employee training and development with your learning system.
What is employee training and development?
First, it’s important to define what ‘employee training and development’ means. It’s a broad topic and can apply to all industries, and it includes a wide range of employee learning practices. At its simplest, training refers to the acquisition of specific skills or improvement knowledge that has a direct impact on short-term job performance. Development, on the other hand, addresses employee growth, with a view to long-term career performance rather than just the immediate impact on short-term job performance. Both are essential for compliance, productivity and employee retention, and all companies need to have a strong handle on how employees are trained, and have a good way to track progress, bringing us to the next topic – employee training programs.
Employee training programs and learning management systems
One of the most effective routes to developing a skilled workforce is the adoption and deployment of well-designed training programs across your business. While this previously required significant use of resources and could easily become unwieldy and hard to manage, cloud-based systems have replaced a lot of the problems with opportunities to build training programs that are clear, content-rich and comprehensive.
Program creation, use, monitoring and improvement are all now integral to learning management systems (LMS), and SAP SuccessFactors provides a highly advantageous means of providing high-quality training to employees.
The benefits of employee training using a unified learning management system (LMS)
A unified LMS is the most effective and practical way to equip both employees and companies with the skills to thrive long-term. It also benefits efficiency by reducing administrative burden for all involved, creating streamlined results and improved outcomes for learners. Key benefits of unified LMS are that it allows you to:
Provide clear career paths with continuous learning programs – Grow employee skills by combining learning with clear goals for development, career paths and recommendations.
Personalise learning content and recommendations – Make use of content curation and learning recommendations to produce innovative, engaging and highly relevant course content.
Combine formal and informal learning by using social learning capabilities – Employ social learning to boost progression and use informal training for greater collaboration.
Make use of expert-created content through your chosen platform – Use resources such as SAP SuccessFactors Open Content Network to benefit from content created by subject matter experts to provide deeper, up-to-date learning.
Improve compliance and lower risk through effective learning program use – Features including automation and document management capabilities can help you stay in line with complex compliance requirements.
What sort of skills do employees want and need?
When looking into employee development, it’s essential to consider not only the requirements for their role (both practical and regulatory), but the skills that employees themselves are looking to obtain and improve upon. A key consideration that can prove hugely beneficial to workers and businesses is leadership training, which can be achieved through SuccessFactors.
In addition to leadership development, it’s important not to forget about soft skills training for employees as a route to improving ROI on development while maintaining high engagement with courses.
How should you start your employee training program?
We have looked at this more comprehensively in a separate blog post, but the key steps are good to be aware of when you’re considering your employee training and development as a topic.
The steps to get started are:
- Identifying the needs of the program
- Setting your objectives
- Designing your programs
- Developing the training programs
- Monitoring performance and success
- Evaluation and review
Once you’ve completed these actions, it’s then an iterative process of measuring and adjusting training programs to achieve ongoing improvement, all of which are incorporated with cloud LMS such as that incorporated in SuccessFactors. To explore this in more depth, see our post on 7 steps for effective employee training programs.
Once training and development programs are in place, what next?
When you have an established development and training program in place, it’s important to focus on the metrics that allow you to further define and improve programs, as well as identifying new opportunities.
With sophisticated workforce analytics you can use data to make fact-based decisions on training, and employee performance tracking can provide the performance information you need to retain, reward, and develop your best people.
Find out more
To find out more about how you can implement and make the most out of employee learning and development with SuccessFactors LMS, get in touch and speak to our team of experienced consultants.