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July 14, 2024
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 min read

15 Types of Employee Training Programs: Top Benefits & Examples

Various types of employee training programs are available today to help your company become genuinely competitive. Let’s discuss some of the best ones in this guide.

15 Types of Employee Training Programs: Top Benefits & Examples

Many companies see employee training as an expense rather than a beneficial investment. It certainly costs some money, but the benefits far outweigh the costs and help your employees adapt to the fast-changing world of AI. According to a report by Gartner, 93% of employees want their employers to help them achieve career growth, or they'll quit. 

Robust investment in employee training closes their knowledge gaps, helps them acquire new technological skills, boosts their productivity, and makes them experts in their field. So, which training programs and protocols are the best? Which employee training programs make the most impact? What are the benefits that help employees advance their careers? 

We'll answer these and many more questions below, so read on. 

What is an Employee Training Program? 

First things first, what are training programs for employees? It is a set of well-defined and planned company activities to help employees learn new skills, eliminate their knowledge gaps, and improve workplace performance. 

Not all training programs are the same, as organizations develop them based on their short and long-term goals, ongoing or upcoming projects, individual requirements, and more. These usually consist of software training, financial skills, compliance awareness, soft skills, and the like. These training and development programs for employees help them adopt new technologies and support their organization's goals.

15 Types of Training for Employees in 2024

Picking training programs for your employees can be a tough nut to crack since there are so many out there. We'll help you by describing all-star training courses to help your employees acquire crucial skills and become highly productive members of your organization. Some of the skills these trainings focus on are customer service, communication, leadership, and much more.

You'll immediately start seeing their benefits once you implement the right types of employee training programs. 

1. Onboarding and Orientation Training 

The foremost training an organization should work on relates to onboarding and orientation. It involves communicating all the essential organizational details to prepare for their new role and become productive employees. These programs clear their confusion, answer their queries, and enable them to make the most of their new environment. 

Here's what a comprehensive orientation training program looks like:

  • Safety procedures information. 
  • Enterprise software functionalities are taught through web-based courses. 
  • Demonstrations and practical sessions with equipment and machinery. 
  • In-person workshops and simulated exercises teach soft skills such as teamwork, customer care, and client dealing. 
  • Various business-related courses are offered by third parties. 

Benefits 

  • Helps new hires build a closer connection with the organization.
  • Clearly defines job expectations and a path to enhanced productivity. 
  • Maps out shared company values and culture.
  • Enhances employee retention by promoting loyalty and a sense of belonging. 
  • Helps new employees build teams and networks.

2. Compliance Training 

Compliance staff training program means educating employees about various laws, policies, and regulations that govern their workplace and the relevant industries in general. These policies guide the day-to-day business operations and define the responsibilities of employees. Mainly, it focuses on the following staff training ideas:

  • Workplace safety
  • Data safety and privacy policies 

Compliance training ensures all employees know the ethical and legal framework they should follow. Failure to adhere to the laws and policies of particular jurisdictions could result in fines and penalties. Compliance training also prevents workplace incidents and emergencies while ensuring optimal productivity. 

Benefits 

  • Helps employees stay aware of laws and regulations.
  • Prevents organizations from incurring costly fines and penalties.
  • Minimizes fraud and unethical conduct.
  • Makes employees more confident about their organization. 

3. Sexual Harassment Training 

According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data, 25-85% of women experience sexual harassment at work, and the percentage for men is 20-60%. It is a serious issue at many workplaces, which can be countered by effective employee training. 

It is a kind of compliance training that educates employees about what constitutes sexual harassment and how to respond if someone is experiencing it. 

It also deals with different kinds of sexual harassment. For instance, educating employees about the legal and policy frameworks that govern these cases, the penalties for engaging in or condoning harassment, and strategies to counter and prevent it. 

Benefits 

  • Awareness of the general concept of sexual harassment.
  • A thorough understanding of the laws and penalties governing the cases.
  • Prevents unwanted incidents.
  • Improves the company’s reputation around trust and accountability. 
  • Enhances the mental well-being of employees and creates a positive work environment. 

4. Safety Training 

Another entry among the types of employee training programs is safety training. It is the first line of defense and ensures your workers stay productive while keeping themselves and their surroundings safe. Safety training also includes educating employees about the consequences of not following the legal guidelines that govern a particular trade. 

Just last year in June, an Illinois pizza manufacturer, Miracapo Pizza Company, faced $2.8 million in fines because they didn't follow machine safety procedures, leading to the death of a sanitation worker. It shows how critical OSHA training is to ensure worker safety and compliance with safety laws. 

(https://www.zippia.com/advice/workplace-injury-statistics/)

Some of the key focuses of these types of training include:

  • Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
  • Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment
  • Fall Prevention
  • Emergency Response
  • Fire Extinguisher Safety

Benefits 

  • Improves worker safety and saves lives. 
  • Reduces material losses.
  • Ensures compliance with safety regulations. 
  • Better emergency preparedness.
  • Improves employee retention. 

5. Technical Skills Training 

Your organization can compete in the market only if your employees have the required technical skills through training programs that involve demonstrations, hands-on practice, lectures on software tools and equipment, and more. 

These trainings usually cover programming languages, software applications, machinery operation, and safety mechanisms. It is essential for companies that operate in highly technical industries, such as software development or high-tech manufacturing. 

Benefits 

  • Enhances problem-solving and critical thinking skills.
  • Improves productivity and workplace performance. 
  • Better adaptability to new tools.
  • Improved employee morale and job satisfaction. 

6. Soft Skills Training 

Technical skills are crucial but shouldn't be taught at the cost of soft skills, which hold equal value. These two combine to form a well-prepared employee on all fronts. Also dubbed as emotional intelligence or people skills, soft skills are crucial in determining how employees behave at the workplace, communicate with each other, and more. 

Some employees might possess the best technical skills but lack interpersonal communication. That's where soft skills training comes in, ensuring your employees have no skill gaps. Following are some core elements of any practical soft skills training program:

  • Interpersonal communication 
  • Conflict resolution 
  • Issue escalation 
  • General behavior

Benefits 

  • Better communication skills for collaboration and teamwork.
  • Improved emotional intelligence.
  • Self-awareness and personal development for better career prospects. 
  • Better decision-making capabilities.

7. Product or Service Training 

It centers around the technical knowledge of products to educate employees on the internal mechanisms of a product, how they work together, and the potential issues customers might encounter while using them. 

For instance, a software company can train its employees about its software products. Whenever customers have queries related to performance, compatibility, and more, the trained employees can easily handle and resolve those issues. Their soft skills of active communication and problem-solving also play a significant role in making customers feel at home. 

Some of the significant aspects covered in these types of employee training programs are:

  • Technical specifications
  • Product features
  • Pricing 
  • Use cases
  • Target markets
  • Customer requirements 
  • Sales techniques 

Another advantage of product training is that it boosts customer satisfaction. When you resolve their problems timely and effectively, they're more likely to become your loyal customers in the long run.

Benefits 

  • Significant improvement in customer satisfaction. 
  • Better sales numbers and closed deals percentage. 
  • Helps employees represent your brand much more effectively. 
  • Reliance on employees boosts their confidence and market skills.

8. Sales Training 

According to a report by Caliper, around 55% of employees working in the sales department don't have actual sales skills. Do you really want employees without sales skills to handle your sales department? The answer is no, and that's where sales training comes in. 

Sales isn't just about displaying something and hoping customers will buy it. It involves in-depth product knowledge, market understanding, and customer psychology. Quality sales training touches all of these aspects and ensures that employees are well-grounded in the sales arena. 

Usually, these types of employee training programs focus on the following areas:

  • Making a sales pitch
  • Handling objections
  • Nurturing leads
  • Closing sales 

Sales training can help you improve customer confidence, boost sales, and enhance revenues. 

Benefits 

  • Promotes in-depth product knowledge. 
  • A thorough understanding of customer preferences and needs. 
  • Better prioritization and time management.
  • Improves sales forecasting and pipeline management.

9. Diversity Training 

According to McKinsey & Company’s report, diversity and inclusion make a company successful and profitable. According to them, companies with a diverse workforce are 36% more profitable than their competitors. KFC has heeded this lesson and has invested heavily in diversity and inclusion training. These numbers and examples incentivize companies to take diversity and inclusion seriously by launching comprehensive training programs. 

Diversity training focuses on educating employees about the importance of diversity and inclusion. The usual topics in this training are cultural acceptance, minimizing unconscious biases against underprivileged groups, amicable conflict resolution, and more. 

Usually, companies arrange for these training sessions regularly to incorporate new changes. It ensures that employees work toward creating a respectable and amicable workplace where everyone feels safe and gives their best. 

Benefits 

  • Allows everyone to participate equally in the organization’s growth. 
  • Minimizes bias and discrimination in the workplace. 
  • Brings diverse ideas and viewpoints to the table. 
  • Attracts talent that prefers diverse and inclusive workplaces. 

10. HR Training 

The HR team is the bedrock of any company. It hires new talent, manages the existing workforce, and ensures that they perform optimally. Despite being so impactful, the HR team also needs support and knowledge to succeed, so where would that come from? 

Traditionally, HR is considered an employee lifecycle department whose only job is to hire employees and schedule their work hours. The modern HR department is much more than that, contributing significantly to developing a core company culture and strategy. HR managers and employees require a mix of hard and soft skills in their training to succeed in the modern workplace. 

Here are a few must-have elements in these types of employee training programs:

  • Onboarding expertise
  • Leadership 
  • Compliance 
  • Effective communication 
  • Consistent evaluation and feedback 

Benefits 

  • Promotes top talent with the best HR practices.
  • An excellent learning opportunity with evolving strategies for talent development. 
  • Manages existing talent.
  • Alignment of HR practices with company objectives. 

11. Technology Training 

Technology is at the heart of all business today, improving production, enhancing operations, organizing supply chains, and whatnot. No wonder technology training is so critical for employees in this era. 

It isn't just about acquiring and applying a few technical skills to daily work. It's also about understanding how technology works, who creates it, its potential industrial applications, and its general implications for the economy and society. 

Here are the most popular topics of technology under observation today:

  • Information technology (IT)
  • Artificial intelligence (AI)
  • Deep learning and neural networks
  • Natural language processing (NLP)
  • Network security
  • Data science 
  • Cloud computing 
  • Mobile app development 

Training employees on at least one or a combination of a few of these technologies is crucial. Choosing the relevant skills also depends upon the industry you're operating in. For instance, if your company operates in the smartphone market, you will likely focus on mobile app development. 

Benefits 

  • Digitally literate employees who can navigate the technological world. 
  • Improved productivity with the use of the latest technology. 
  • Experimentation with new technologies leads to innovation.
  • Enhanced problem-solving capabilities. 

12. Leadership and Management Training 

Your business needs managers and leaders to ensure it continues competing in the market and earning its fair share. Your teams require effective leadership and management training that touches diverse topics, such as team-building, communication, problem-solving, decision-making in crunch situations, performance management, and more. 

Whenever an organization starts leadership training, its goal should be to provide the right tools to help their employees manage small and large teams, craft and implement strategies, resolve interpersonal conflicts, and the like.

Ultimately, these types of training programs produce leaders accustomed to modern workplace sensitivities and technicalities. They should be communicative, collaborative, knowledgeable, empathetic, and embrace change as a positive development. Only those leaders who adapt to change and possess emotional intelligence and flexibility learn from robust training protocols. 

Benefits 

  • Better relationships and rapport-building.
  • Conflict resolution skills. 
  • Succession planning by identifying talent.
  • Quality decision-making that perfectly aligned with the organizational goals. 

13. Quality Assurance Training 

Quality assurance training is critical because it ensures your organization only sells the highest-quality products and services. Usually, this training involves topics such as qualification control, following industry standards, and improving quality control. 

All companies have product managers and developers trained to gauge product quality and approve them before they hit the market. They follow predefined standards based on industry regulations and various laws. For example, if a company deals in software products, product managers ensure that their applications perform optimally, don't crash, have all the important functionalities, and more. 

The quality assurance training includes teaching about statistical process controls, root cause analysis, performance evaluations, compatibility analysis, and continuous improvements. 

Benefits 

  • Compliance with industry standards and laws.
  • Minimizes product defects.
  • Consistent performance.
  • Customer and stakeholder trust.
  • Cost savings by reducing product recalls. 

14. e-Learning 

E-learning is getting increasingly popular in corporate settings, given that the global corporate e-learning market will hit $50 billion by 2026. From onboarding to professional development to cross-training, no aspect of corporate training is complete without e-learning today. 

E-learning typically involves educating and training employees through internet-enabled devices like smartphones, computers, tablets, and laptops. It is one of the most convenient ways to train your employees, as they don't have to be present on the premises to learn anything. 

They could travel during the training sessions and still learn everything being taught. Almost all industries can benefit from the e-learning revolution and impart quality training to their employees. 

Benefits 

  • Convenient upskilling through self-paced learning. 
  • No time or location barrier.
  • Much cheaper training that is easy on the organization’s finances. 
  • Real-time performance tracking and progress reports.

15. Coaching Sessions 

Coaching sessions usually involve more in-person interaction than other training sessions. They involve a manager or an experienced colleague who interacts one-on-one with a junior employee to help them enhance their skills and workplace performance. Since these are in-person interactions also include consistent feedback, where progress is discussed in detail and improvements are suggested. 

It's not just about improving an employee’s skills. Regular coaching sessions also help improve job satisfaction and are a great way of discussing new ideas that one cannot discuss too openly. It is a long-term relationship that builds over time and continues as the employee’s career progresses, regularly shifting focus to new goals.

Benefits 

  • Motivation and increased job satisfaction. 
  • Effective career progression with practical goal-setting. 
  • Less burnout and work stress. 
  • Better productivity and performance. 

Conclusion 

Our comprehensive list will help significantly in training your employees with the right skills. Both hard and soft skills matter in productive organizational workflow and ensure compliance with all laws and regulations. If you also want to deliver the right types of employee training programs, Coursebox is the right choice. 

With AI courses and assessment generation, you can train and test your employees on a wide scale. We have a dedicated AI tutor that you can train based on your course content. It answers questions at any time of the day and ensures optimal training for your employees. 

Coursebox has created a class-leading LMS to take your organizational training to the next level. Depending on your training needs, budget, and timeframe, you can pick a bundle that suits you and take advantage of the most advanced AI LMS on the market. 

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