Are you trying to create a corporate online training strategy? It is not really as difficult as you think. As long as you know the steps to follow, you can simplify what you need to do so that your online courses will be successful this year.
We all know how important training is for any company. Regardless if you have a big corporation or small business, having a plan to train people will always be a necessary step in taking the company to the next level. At least, this is true if your business model requires you to hire people to help with the daily tasks that are required to keep the company running.
Any business will need improvement as the years go by. In most cases, the improvements revolve around the technical upgrades that you can use to help make your business processes more efficient and productive. Identifying these improvements is easy enough. Cascading the information and the necessary changes to the employees is another matter. This is why a strategy has to be formed to make sure that any improvement or upgrade in the company will be delivered to the right people in the right manner.
So what are the steps that you need to follow in order to create a corporate online training program?
Step 1: Set your goals.
Every strategy begins with a goal. This is your target after all. It is hard to plan anything if you do not know your end goals. Make sure that when you are defining your goals, you make it as specific as you can. Generic goals will not really take you anywhere. A specific one will help give your program direction. For instance, your goal can be to teach and implement a new software program that will help the warehouse department with the inventory of the company products. Or it can be to provide your marketing officers with the latest techniques in creating social marketing campaigns. Defining the goal will allow you to check if it is aligned with the overall corporate goals of the company. If not, then you know that the training will just be wasting the time of your employees.
Step 2: Outline the training course.
Once you have your goal, you can now work on the training program. You can map out the course by identifying how you will start it, what activities you need to have and the assessment that will cap off the lesson. In other words, what you need to create is an outline. This will probably take you a lot longer to do compared to the first step. You need to know how you can present the information in such a way that will make retention higher. A good technique is to concentrate on how you can show the value of the course to the employees. That means taking careful note of the content in the course and how it will be presented. If they cannot see your course as something valuable, then you can bet that they will not really pay attention to what the program wants to teach them.
Step 3: Identify the tools you will need.
After mapping out the course, your next step is to identify the tools that you will use to create that course. There are so many elearning tools that you can use on your online training program. Use the outline of the course to guide you on what you will need. A tip here is to have variety. You can use a video tutorial. Some content can be discussed through an online forum. By knowing how you want the course to be presented, you can limit the tools that you can use to deliver them to the trainees.
Step 4: Finalize your learning environment.
When you have both the outline of the course and the tools that you will need, you can finalize the learning environment by which your course will be delivered. Will it be a purely online training program? Will it be self-paced lesson or will there be instances when the whole class will meet in real time to discuss their progress? It is all up to the requirements of your course. Do not forget to look back on the goals of your course to ensure that everything is still aligned.
Step 5: Set up an assessment and monitoring program.
As part of your training strategy, you need to have a plan that goes beyond the course. It is important for you to set up a program that will help you assess and monitor how effective the course was. How are the employees or participants using what they learned to improve their productivity at work? This is separate from the training course itself. It is your follow-up program that will help you improve future training programs.
Follow these five steps to help you set up a strategy that will help take your corporate training initiatives to the next level.
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