7 Employee training trends for you to follow in 2019

Employee training shouldn’t be aimed at only new hires. Conducting regular training for all employees within an organization is a vital step for keeping everyone on top of their game. So, even if you don’t have new hires to train at the moment, employee training should still be a regular activity in your organization.

But to make it effective, you need to make it fun and interesting, to motivate your employees to keep learning and growing. You can do so by following the latest employee training trends discussed below, some of which include adopting cutting-edge technology that can completely transform corporate training as we know it.

Enabling Training Anytime, Anywhere

It’s extremely important to enable employees to access training materials anytime, anywhere, and on any device. If you conduct training only in-house, you lose a lot of opportunities for growth, as your employees will have less time to train.

Utilizing employee training software, you can create online training courses, and deliver them with the help of an LMS. This will help your employees hone their skills much faster. They’ll be able to learn at their own pace, and train more effectively. This is perhaps the most important employee training trend to follow.

Delivering training courses online also helps you create interactive and engaging content that holds attention and improves knowledge retention.

Personalizing the Learning Experience

When the learning experience is personalized, your trainees retain much more information and master every concept with ease. Learner-centric training is more meaningful and it creates opportunities for adaptive learning.

You should design your training content with each employee in mind, to meet their specific needs and cater to different learning paces and styles. Always provide personalized feedback, as it will help each employee focus on all the areas they need to improve.

Employee training shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all training, because everyone learns differently. That’s why adaptive learning is key to effective training, and that’s achieved through a personalized learning experience.

Providing Experiential Learning

According to the Workplace Learning & Development Report by LinkedIn, making time for learning is the number one challenge among employees. This problem can be addressed with online employee training.

There was another very interesting finding in the research that sparked another trend for 2019. The finding was that 49% of employees (out of 2,200 surveyed) prefer to learn at the point of need.

This is where experiential learning can come in handy. As the name suggests, it’s learning through experience, and that’s the best way to actually retain information and practice what you’ve learned right away.

So, implement experiential learning activities into your employee training programs. That way, your trainees will perform particular tasks, learn from that experience, and keep learning through reflection on doing.

Conducting Refresher Training

Refresher training, or retraining, helps existing employees hone their skills and improve performance. With this training, you help them reflect on already established skills and methods and acquaint them with new techniques and practices for even better performance.

The primary purpose of refresher training is to fight the Forgetting Curve, which depicts how quickly people forget what they’ve learned if they don’t reflect on it. The Forgetting Curve hypothesizes that we forget 50% of what we’ve learned after just one hour if we don’t review it or make efforts to retain it. If we don’t review it within 24 hours, we forget 70% of the information.

This is why corporate trainers are increasingly designing employee training programs for knowledge retention. LMS software is one of the best ways to achieve this, as you can set reminders for training reviews, and provide fun quizzes for knowledge assessment.

Automating Employee Training

Automating employee training saves a lot of time, which is why this trend is gaining a lot of momentum. Employee training software and an LMS can help you follow this trend.

You can assign courses, learning activities, and roles to each trainee, and create learning paths using an employee training software. You can add deadlines for every assignment, making sure they access the right materials at the right time of need.

The software will send you notifications for every task and course completion, after which you can generate reports to see how well each employee performed. You can also automate employee assessment by using your LMS to integrate quizzes and tests at the end of each training session. The software can automatically grade your learners, and give them certificates to motivate them to keep learning.

Embracing AI

AI technologies are revolutionizing employee development, as they personalize the learning experience and maximize performance. If you apply AI to your LMS, you’ll be able to create custom training for every employee, tailoring it to their needs and helping them take their performance to the next level.

You can integrate an AI-powered chatbot into your LMS and provide intelligent support to your trainees 24/7.

Leveraging VR Technologies

VR technologies can have a huge impact on employee training, which is why an increasing number of businesses is harnessing their power.

According to a recent VR employee training survey by Capterra, 46% of SMBs in the U.S. are planning to leverage VR in the next two years.

VR can provide real-life simulations that enable employees to practice everything they’ve learned during training. It may just be the best way to master their skills and increase knowledge retention, as it creates a life-like experience that truly feels real.

Key Takeaways

These employee training trends will definitely help you make 2019 the year when all your employees reach their full potential. Start implementing them one after one so that you create a learning environment that your entire workforce love.