4 Steps to Increase Employee Interest in Training and Development

For many, training is considered to be a necessary evil. Employees may see it as an annual requirement or something that takes time away from other more important things. Your organization has invested money, time, and energy into training and development opportunities with either little payoff or engagement. Often training and development may not be the correct solution, the training’s context is lost to the employee, it has little relevance to the employee, or the employee doesn’t know or understand the outcomes of the training and development. Without addressing these hurdles your training and development has a great chance of failing to obtain employee excitement, engagement, and interest.

The steps below can help to increase employee excitement, engagement, and interest in training and development at your company.  

Correct Solution

Often, we are too quick to assume the solution to most issues is a training need. Without performing a thorough root cause analysis, you run the risk of missing the underlying problem. You need to identify if the issue is related to a process, tool, performance, job requirement, employee ability, or lack of training. If the issue is due to the lack of access to software no amount of training will solve that. Training should only be used if a process is updated or changed or if the employee had a lack or needed a refresher of knowledge to perform the task.

Always perform the 5 Whys to identify the root cause analysis before starting at training development to ensure you are solving for the correct issue with the correct solution. The 5 Whys is a root cause analysis method in which you continue to ask why for the issue until you identify the underlying cause. To use the 5 Whys start by defining a problem then ask Why Is This Happening continued by then asking Why Is That again and again until you arrive at the root cause.

Context

Employee’s investment and attention is directly tied to what they can get out of the training, what’s in it for me. Unfortunately, not all training can be exciting material. Presenting training and development in fun and engaging ways helps with employee investment and attention but without context as to why they need the information the effects of the training will mostly be missed. The trick is to make the employees understand the link between this training and their job. The link for training to a job should always be more than do this, watch this, sign this, or get fired. There is no reason to be invested more than completing the task at hand.

You need to ask yourself what does the employee, team, department, company, etc. obtains from completing this training. Why should they care to learn this information? Without context training and development fails to capture a learner’s investment in the content.

Relevant  

In this busy world taking time for training seems harder and harder. It means something else must be placed on the sideline in order to dedicate time and resources to attend a training or development opportunity. Develop, purchase, or partner to deploy training and development opportunities that your employees want to learn. To create a learning culture at a company there must be opportunities for employees to seek out relevant training for their current or future job and/or goals. Additionally, the training should be precise and digestible to ensure employees are able to consume the training when they need it, where they need it, and how they need it to place the new knowledge or skill into practice.

Ask yourself before deploying a training, is it relevant to your employees. Make sure the content addresses the current need and doesn’t have additional fluff as the message can be easy to be lost and the training can quickly be viewed as a waste of time.

Outcome

What is the outcome of the training? Develop or obtain employee training and development that has clearly stated objectives with measurable outcomes. In order to sell an employee on a training opportunity, they need to know exactly what they are signing up for. The outcomes should be used as advertisements to grow excitement about training or development.