Employers need to weigh in various considerations in designing their on-the-job training programme
Training employees can be done in many ways, such as mentoring, coaching, job rotation, committee assignments, apprenticeship and periodic in-house training.
Regardless of which method employers utilise to develop their employees, they need to ensure that their training programme should be well designed and planned, and is able to achieve training outcomes that are predictable and reliable.
Training Industry Magazine outlines five elements of a successful training programme.
The first is focus on work outcomes, which involves documenting and analysing work requirements – including measures of effective performance – and ensuring that they are well understood.
The second is clear training goals and plan, i.e. using an instructional design process in defining specific, measurable learning outcomes that can lead to improving work performance.
These goals and plan should provide both the trainer and the trainee a road map of the overall training experience, describing the tasks that the trainee will be trained on, the recommended sequence of training and the training timeline.
The third is good design matters, especially when the programme is developed based on research-backed instructional design practices, including clean content, spaced practice and proper feedback.
The fourth involves providing materials for the coach and the employee vital information about the task, for instance steps, potential scenarios and criteria to assess successful performance.
These materials should be easily located, used and maintained, and must be given to both the trainer and the trainee to make sure that they equally understand the expectation of the training programme.
Finally, employers need to select the right coach, be it an employee or a manager who have a high level of job expertise and the ability to coach well.
However, as meticulous as the training programme is set out to be, the challenge lies in putting it into practice. Thus, to implement the programme effectively, employers must make training and development part and parcel of their organisational culture.
They need to achieve this by being consistent and committed in training their employees, and communicating well to their employees the importance of training in their daily work.
