Training Development Tips To Increase ROI
Are you searching for ways to maximize the Return On Investment (ROI) you’re getting from the budget you have for employee training and development initiatives?
It can be difficult to know how best to use the budget you have when there are many needs to meet. Do you focus on upgrading technology, using media to enhance the look and feel of your courses, or choose to spend your money on new training courses altogether? Additionally, you might run into difficulty creating agreement around how to proceed, and expedited timelines and other pressures create challenges. In this article, we’ll cover how best to prioritize your budget for training—whether you’re planning to update content, create new courses entirely, or blend both approaches—and get the most from the resources you have available.
Check out the 3 steps listed below. Instructional Designers and training consultants use these strategies to enhance their learning solutions for optimal learner engagement, efficiency, and success. Incorporate one or all three of the methods, and you’ll improve your chances of creating a successful training while making the best use of the resources you have.
Employee Training And Development Best Practices
1. Plan Your Training Strategy With Needs Analysis And Performance Mapping
You might think, why spend money from your already limited budget on planning and predesign work? But, as the saying goes, “when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Start by creating, if you haven’t already, a skills matrix for the roles that will need training and employee development learning. Once you’ve identified needed skills, link performance gaps with desired outcomes. Ask yourself, what do successful employees need to be ready to do in this role? What steps must be taken? Do we have content to fill these holes in training? When you know how performance is linked with desired outcomes, you can drill down on training courses to fill existing gaps.
2. Center The Employee’s Learning Experience
This may sound simple—of course you’re thinking of the learner, right?—but it’s a critical step to take for learning retention and engagement. Design your learning courses with empathy. As you’re planning your training, think about what your learners will need to be successful. Will they need time and flexibility to absorb and complete a large amount of material? Maybe experience with complicated processes to build competency and confidence? What about practice to retain newly acquired skills and continue building critical decision-making skills and confidence? Will learners need visual or audio demonstrations? Technology to enable asynchronous or blended learning experiences? Any course you design should be built around the specific needs of your learning audience to maximize your chance for successful outcomes. Prioritize those needs, and your improved outcomes will reflect an automatic ROI.
3. Use On-The-Job Resources
As you’re developing your course, keep in mind the value of creating resources that can be organized, accessed, and downloaded for future reference. Quick at-a-glance references, streamlined content, microlearning (or bite-sized and shortened) modules, downloadable PDFs, file libraries with videos, navigation tools (if your content will be available after official training time has ended), landing pages, development planners, and other tools that allow for follow-up can all be used by your learners on the job to reinforce learning. Having tools to aid in memory is an incredibly valuable way to support your learners’ progress, improve outcomes long-term, and is even useful for management to support their teams. Such resources not only improve learning outcomes, but they also extend the value of your development dollars and budget by remaining in use.
Conclusion
By keeping 3 basic best practices in mind, you lay the groundwork to get the greatest ROI on your training budget. Those 3 best practices are: using a needs analysis and performance mapping process to determine and address any existing skills gaps; designing your training modules with the learner experience and needs as a top priority to enhance engagement and increase effectiveness; and developing all course materials (whenever possible) with the dual purpose of use after training as an on-the-job resource to reinforce learning and enhance retention of newly learned skills.
Bonus Tip
If you could use additional ideas or are planning to work with a training company or consultant, one of the most important things you can do ahead of time is determine content readiness. Start with a review of your existing learning content to determine need and communicate your priorities with your training company to make the best use of your budget, time, and resources.
AllenComm
The experts at AllenComm solve business problems with beautiful custom learning solutions. We bring creativity into instructional design. We change behaviors and influence choices. We build better training.
