What Makes Employee Training Bad?

While most people are thrilled and excited to start a new job, many dread the training portion of the onboarding process. The reason? Bad employee training programs.

Here’s what makes them so dreadful:

It’s Too Long

Remember back in school how there was always one class that seemed to drag on forever? Remember how you dreaded that class every day and no matter what, it always felt like it was hours long? Do you want your new employees to feel that way about training?

Of course you don’t!

One of the most common complaints we hear from new employees is that training lasts too long. In the age of smartphones and social media, it’s hard for most of us to stay focused on anything for a full hour, let along all day. If your training drags on too long, or if there aren’t regularly scheduled breaks, your employees are sure to lose interest at some point.

To keep everyone focused, carefully craft your training program to hold your employees’ interest.

It’s Taught by The Wrong Person

If you have fantastic content but don’t have capable trainers, you’re setting your training program up to fail from the start. You need to have teachers, managers, or trainers in place who’ve mastered the materials and can hold the room.

After you’ve invested time and money to develop superior training materials, you’ll be wise to further invest in well-trained presenters. Otherwise, the initial investment will be wasted.

Many companies use a variety of presenters for different sections of their training program. This way, each presenter can focus on just one area and learners can experience different training styles for shorter periods of time.

It Includes Irrelevant Information

Often, in an effort to be thorough, employers fall into the trap of including information that is irrelevant and/or unnecessary. This is a mistake because information overload will cause employees to lose interest and stop paying attention. Including information just for the sake of including it will make your training program unnecessarily long and boring.

One simple way to find out if you’re making this mistake is to collect feedback from employees at the end of each training session.

It Isn’t Dynamic or Engaging

It’s important to consider that different people learn in different ways. For example, some people learn best from visual cues, while others learn better from hearing the information. To make sure you’re appealing to all learning styles, offer a variety of mediums. If you have the means to let employees choose to participate in in-person training or online training, even better. By switching up the delivery style, you’ll also help your employees stay engaged with you throughout the program.

Embedding videos, interactive exercises, and tests will also keep employees engaged in the training materials.

It Never Changes

It can take a lot of work, time, and money to develop your employee training program. Because of the volume of work involved in crafting the whole thing, many employers are reluctant to change theirs, even when changes are necessary. However, this hands-off approach can cost you in the future. Instead of pretending your training program is perfect, schedule regular reviews to make it easier to apply updates. And don’t forget to take employee feedback into consideration when you update the training material and delivery. Remember, the more you current and relevant your training, the more effective your employees will be.

When companies offer subpar training, their employees don’t know what is expected of them or how to succeed in their jobs. And when employees feel like they’ve been hung out to dry, morale is low and turnover is high. Developing an effective training program may appear costly and time consuming but it’s nothing compared to the time and money spent to constantly recruit and hire new employees.