Every effective employee training program aims to get team members aligned, so they can be held accountable. But few companies have high-impact programs that drive these results. The ones that do enjoy a 24% higher profit margin than those with low-impact training. And contrary to popular belief, most of these companies didn't spend more to get these results.
Instead, they designed their training programs around company goals and the people who would help reach them. That way, the right information was communicated and stuck.
So, here's everything you need to know to build an effective employee training program that drives the results you expect, and to roll it out across the whole company.
What is employee training?
Employee training (also known as corporate training) is the ongoing process of giving staff the critical knowledge and skills they need to do their jobs. By training your employees, you align individuals with company goals, improve performance, and hold people accountable. As a result, you set people up to succeed in their roles.
For example, you might send your social media specialist through Trainual so they can learn your company's branding, voice, and best practices, and have them job shadow other people on the marketing team so they understand how the team collaborates.
This way, they don't have to ask how to get their job done. They can work confidently and independently in their sphere. But without that training, your social media specialist will likely miss expectations, make mistakes without knowing it, and grow frustrated with the feedback. In worst-case scenarios, they quit, leaving small companies to spend upwards of $4,000 hiring and onboarding a replacement.
🔥 Tip: The average small company spends $1,678 per employee on training each year. Documented, self-serve training lets you reuse the same materials for every hire instead of paying to rebuild them each time.
Employee training vs. employee development
Employee training programs teach individual employees what they need to know for their current role. Employee development programs teach them what they need to know for future career opportunities.
Because of this, training tends to focus on the technical skills and knowledge that immediately improve job performance. Development focuses on the soft skills and knowledge needed for career advancement.
Types of employee training and development
There are three main types of employee training: onboarding training, ongoing training, and transitional training. Each can be delivered remotely (asynchronously or synchronously), in person, or as blended learning. Here's what all that means.
Onboarding training
Onboarding training (also known as new hire training) is any instruction designed to get a new hire fully productive. Learning the company mission and values, general company policies, and role-specific how-tos are all part of onboarding training.
Onboarding training typically starts right after new employee orientation. It uses a combination of training methods, including reading the employee handbook, job shadowing, one-on-one training, cross-training, and hands-on learning. These methods usually continue for about 90 days, until the new team member transitions out of onboarding. A 30-60-90 day onboarding plan gives that stretch a structure.
Ongoing (continuous) training
Ongoing training is any training that keeps your team aligned and up to date on best practices. It can be designed at the individual, team, department, or company-wide level.
Ongoing training usually happens when companies release new products, update key policies, or implement more efficient standard operating procedures. It's the most frequent of the three types, because it can happen formally (in a scheduled training course) or informally (in a weekly one-on-one).
Transitional training
Transitional training is any training that follows a promotion, team change, or role redesign. It sits in the middle ground between onboarding and ongoing training.
Unlike a new hire, an employee in transition already understands the company's goals and how to achieve them. So transitional training covers only the skills or knowledge they lack for their new role or team, and sets them up for success when they make the move.
Remote training
Remote training is any training where the trainer and the trainee are in different places. Online webinars, e-courses, and other self-directed learning methods all count as remote training.
Remote training is just as effective as in-person training (if not more), because everyone gets the same content delivered the same way. It's also cheaper to deliver, since in-person training costs upwards of $2k annually per employee.
The greatest advantage of remote training is flexibility. You can send remote and local employees alike through the same training, and they'll finish it independently, usually faster than if they waited for an in-person session.
Synchronous training
Synchronous training (also called instructor-led training) is any workplace learning where the training manager and the trainee take part at the same time, such as a training session held in a specific room at a set time.
Asynchronous training
Asynchronous training (also known as self-led online learning) is the opposite of synchronous training. Trainees access their training without the training manager and get up to speed independently, so they can go through the material any time, from anywhere.
In-person training
In-person training is, as it sounds, any training where the trainer and trainee are in the same space at the same time. Job rotation, shadowing, and traditional classroom training are all types of in-person training.
While less flexible, in-person training can be adjusted for the individual. It gives employees space to ask real-time questions, which most remote training doesn't. As a result, in-person training tends to be more collaborative and personalized, which increases knowledge retention.
But no matter how effective the training is, the average person forgets roughly 50% of what they learned within an hour, and more than 70% within 24 hours. If they lose the reference materials handed out, they end up back at square one. That's why a searchable knowledge base matters even when the training itself happens in a room.
Blended learning
Blended learning combines aspects of asynchronous and synchronous, remote and in-person training. The trainer and trainee work together for some portions of the training, but not all.
For example, blended learning might mean sending a new hire through Trainual to learn your sales best practices, then asking them to shadow a long-term sales rep on a few calls.
Blended learning typically builds a deeper understanding of a subject and increases retention, because it caters to a variety of learning styles. Employees go through the information at their own speed without giving up the chance to ask questions or practice the concepts firsthand.
How to create a training curriculum
Whatever type of training you're delivering, these six steps help you build an effective training program.
1. Determine your learning objective
Before you can build a training program, you need a clear learning objective: what should your employees know or be able to do after this training?
Your learning objective might be to standardize your hiring process, refresh outdated knowledge about the market, or fill knowledge gaps around your health insurance plans.
The objective tells you what information belongs in the training and what doesn't. It also gives you clear parameters for measuring the training's effectiveness once it's rolled out. (More on that in a bit.)
2. Identify the trainee profile
Your trainee profile is a general picture of who will go through this training program. It determines what they already know and what gaps still need filling, which tells you what information goes into the training.
New hires, for example, need more context than someone who's been at your company for 10 years. If this training is part of your onboarding program, you'll need to provide far more context than if you were rolling out an updated version of your diversity and inclusion policy.
To build the trainee profile, look at the people you'll send through the program and identify what they have in common:
- Tenure: how long they've been with the company
- Location: where they log in from most days
- Department: where they sit in the company
- Hierarchy: what level their title is
- Roles: what responsibilities they own
3. Build the employee training plan
An employee training plan is your roadmap for getting everyone at your company the information they need for their jobs, so everyone is aligned and can be held accountable.
At a bare minimum, a comprehensive plan covers what employees will learn, in what order, and when. Let's break that down.
What they'll learn
Looking at your learning objective, list all the skills and knowledge someone would need to achieve it.
Say you want to standardize your content strategy. At a minimum, your training should include:
- Your brand's voice
- The types of content you create
- The cadence for publishing each type
- The process for publishing
Write those down. Then, looking at your trainee profile, add anything else these people need to know. Try not to cross anything off your list, only add to it.
The general rule for building your team's training is that more information is (almost) always better. The exception is information already documented elsewhere. In that case, still mention it, and link to the existing documentation or explain where to find it.
In what order
Now put everything on your list into a sequence that makes sense. Consider what someone needs to know first to learn the next thing more easily, like learning to walk before you run.
In the content strategy example, it might make sense to start with the high-level information, like what kinds of content your company publishes and how often, then move into the details, like voice and process.
This ordered list works as the outline for your training program, whether in person or remote. If you're hosting the training in Trainual, it's the order you present the smaller topics within your larger subject, and it becomes the training path people follow.
When
With the sequence set, create a loose timeline, such as three 30-minute sessions, or two weeks from the day you assign the content.
To set the timeline, consider how long it takes to cover the information and for the employee to digest and retain it. Go too fast, and you risk information overload. Go too slow, and you risk losing your employees.
So how do you find the right speed? It depends on who you're teaching and what they're learning. That's where self-led training shines, because no two employees learn at exactly the same speed. Self-led training puts your team in the driver's seat.
If you're mixing synchronous methods into the documented training, mark them. Write in the training content, "Stop here and reach out to Sam to shadow how they manage users in WordPress."
Then, if you're using Trainual, add a mandatory one-question quiz that asks, "Did you shadow Sam?" If the answer is no, they can't go on, and you know to follow up.
4. Build the related training content
Here comes the fun part. With your training plan in hand, build the training content: document the processes, policies, and best practices trainees need to know when they've finished training.
Ideally, put all this content in one place so it's easy to find during and after training. Even if your training goes perfectly, people will forget pieces of it. (Remember, the average person forgets 50% of new information within an hour.)
So plan for it and house the content in online training software (we're biased and love Trainual for this). That way, your team can look back at the processes and policies whenever they need a refresher instead of waiting for the next scheduled session.
👉 See what customers say about training their teams in Trainual.
5. Run the training program
You've invested the time to plan and create your team's training content, so put it to the test. If you're running the training synchronously, put it on people's calendars. If you're running it asynchronously with a tool like Trainual, assign the content (and set a due date so people finish it promptly).
6. Measure the training's impact
Measuring your training's effectiveness might seem obvious, but most companies don't do it. Only about 50% of companies track what their employees have to say about the training, and even fewer track the impact it made.
To gauge effectiveness, at the very least ask everyone who went through the training for a self-reflection. Include questions that compare what they knew before and after, such as:
- As a percentage, roughly how much of this information was new?
- What is the most important thing you learned today?
- Starting tomorrow, how will you apply this new knowledge in your role?
- What questions do you still have?
Ideally, you'll also track whether you met your learning objective. For example, track employee comprehension and retention over time with Trainual quizzes. A few quick questions let managers confirm the employee learned the material before going back into the field.
Once they're in the field, put the new knowledge to the test. Choose a hard performance metric that directly reflects the training's objective. If the training was about closing sales, measure that team member's close rate. When that isn't possible, use related metrics, such as consistency of behavior changes, to see how much impact the training had. For new hires, time to productivity is one of the clearest measures.
If an individual's performance didn't improve, they likely need to go back through the training. If the whole group's performance didn't improve, you probably need to revamp the program.
Employee training isn't a one-and-done thing. As long as your company is running, you'll need to revamp your training program, update your training content, and refresh people's knowledge from time to time. That up-front effort to keep everyone aligned and accountable pays off on the back end.
How to roll out an employee training program across the whole company
The best way to roll out a training program company-wide is to pilot it with one team, give each department an owner, assign role-based training paths, and track completion from a single place. Trainual, the Business Operations & SOP Software growing teams run training on, puts the training, the processes behind it, and the tracking in one system, so you don't have to stitch together an LMS, a wiki, and a spreadsheet.
If you're an ops leader, the hard part isn't writing the training. It's getting 50, 150, or 250 people through the right training without chasing anyone. Use these steps.
Update, reassign, and confirm review whenever a process changes.
- Pilot with one team for 2 to 4 weeks. Pick a team with a clear process and a manager who will give feedback. Train them first, fix what confuses them, then expand.
- Name a training owner in every department. Each owner keeps their department's processes and training current. Without owners, content goes stale within a quarter.
- Build role-based paths, not one big course. Assign training by role, department, or location with role-based assignment, so a new sales rep and a new technician each see only what applies to them. Add knowledge checks with a pass threshold to confirm people understood it.
- Roll out in waves. Move department by department. Announce the why, the deadline, and who to ask for help. Give each wave a due date.
- Track completion and scores weekly. Watch who has finished, who is stuck, and which checks people fail. Follow up with the people who are behind and fix the lessons that trip people up.
- Keep it current. When a process changes, update the lesson, reassign it, set a new deadline, and confirm people reviewed it. Version history shows what changed and when.
Trainual also offers hands-on implementation support for new customers, including help migrating existing content and building a rollout plan. For the common ways rollouts stall, see how to roll out training without it failing, and for why people engage with training or ignore it, the psychology of employee training. New hires who join mid-rollout can follow structured onboarding from day one.
Ready to see how Trainual works?
👉 Book a demo and see how Trainual rolls out role-based training across every department and tracks who has finished.
Want a sneak peek?
👉 Read customer stories from teams who've rolled out training company-wide without chasing anyone.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a company-wide training rollout take?
Plan for a 2 to 4 week pilot, then 4 to 8 weeks to roll out department by department. The timeline depends on how much existing documentation you have.
Who should own the training program?
One executive sponsor, usually operations or HR, plus one owner in each department who keeps that department's content current.
Should we train everyone at once or in phases?
In phases. A pilot shows you what's unclear before everyone sees it, and waves keep managers from being overloaded.
How do you track whether training worked?
Track completion, knowledge-check scores, and time to get a new hire up to speed. Review them weekly during rollout and monthly after.
Do we need an LMS to roll out training?
Not necessarily. Many small and mid-sized companies use Trainual to combine their SOPs, role-based training, and tracking in one place instead of running a separate LMS.
