It is a time consuming procedure to train new employees effectively whether your organization is big or small. New employees are like a baby in your family. Since they are new to your organization, you may want to train them how to follow your regulations and how to catch up with the system or how to manage a project and so on. It is not an easy task. However, if you focus on the right methods, the task will become easier than you think.
During my 8 years working as a sales manager for a big heavy equipment supplier and 5 years running my own company, I have some experience in training new employees that I am going to share with you in this article.
4 Tips to train new employees effectively
While training new employees is a must-do thing, how to train them effectively is your expectation. Get to know their wishes, their skills, knowledge and comprehensive rates are the key points to your success.
1. Define your employees style
Before preparing training courses for your new employees, you should always spend time listening to your employees. Asking them question to learn how much they know about your company. Why do they want to work for you? What are their basic understandings about your products and services? Try to gather as much information as possible to guarantee that your training courses can provide useful information for them. As far as I experienced, there are 2 common new employee styles:
- 100% new: which means they are totally new to your business, new to your corporation and don’t have any knowledge about your industry. With such kind of new employees, you will need to train them step by step. For example: at first, prepare a short course to explain about your industry and the position of your brand on the market. After that, you can start introducing about your company, your products and other things.
- Experienced one in the same industry: which means they had been working for another company who supply the same products and services with your company. With such kind of new employees, a course about market overview, brand position will be unnecessary. You can start your training by teaching them about your product at the beginning.
2. Courses preparation
Once you’ve understood your new employees, you’ll need to prepare your training courses. You can choose to prepare normal training courses in presentation, slideshow, videos or online training courses. Depend on your facilities and your skills. For me, I would prefer online training courses since they are more convenient to train the employees remotely. Online training courses help you save your time too. However, in order to create online courses, you will need professional software like ActivePresenter, iSpring Suite or Adobe Captivate 9 to start. Here are my tips on how to prepare for an effective online course:
- I used Microsoft Power Point to prepare the courses. I often start with an introduction about target of the course. I also describe what are my expectations from my new employees as well as what they need to learn from the courses. The content of my presentation will show all necessary information, targeted at each new employee style. And at the conclusion of the courses, I often summarize the courses content and ask them to make a test to see how they understand my training. That’s can be done by the above mentioned software.
- By using ActivePresenter, you can import training slides into the software and add interactivities like quizzes, annotations to the slides, then export them into HTML5 to show it on my website. New employees can visit and learn the course at any time. This software is free to use for non-commercial. You can visit its website and download to your computer here.
3. Track their comprehension & Feedback
Tracking your new employees’ understanding is as important as getting their feedbacks about your training courses. You can also make use of tracking options in the software like ActivePresenter or iSpring Suite. Added to that feedback is the key to your effective training courses. You should always ask your new employees about their feedbacks to the courses to correct their mistakes before they become bad habits. You should:
- Track their understanding: by setting up a target that they have to pass. For example, getting 80/100 point in their tracking report.
- Following up to see how they execute the work after being trained.
4. Repeat your training
If the results of your training courses are not what you expected, don’t hesitate to repeat your training courses. You can ask them to start over from the beginning of the courses until they completely understood your courses and follow the rules. You can:
- Ask them to join another training course to improve their understandings.
- Ask them to join your online training course again if you can’t see they’ve learnt something from your courses.
- Ask them to make a report on what they’ve leant from your training courses.
Bottom line
New employees are important resources that affect the development of your organization. They can be either development motivation or barriers depend on how you train them. I hope those 4 small tips can help you train your new employees effectively. Remember to follow us to receive more valuable post notifications in the future.
Good luck!
Elearning Supporter 