Crafting Effective Online Courses for Employee Training

Crafting Effective Online Courses for Employee Training

How to make your team set for success through training and ensure excellent performance? Learn the simple steps, tips, and tricks to create effective online courses for employee training.

Employee training is a crucial part of every business, big or small. It isn’t hard to recognise the benefits of employee training once it’s there. But, what is hard is to integrate it into your corporate culture. And what is even harder (or so it seems) is to create effective online courses for employee training.

In this article, we’ll tell you:

  • Why employee training matters;
  • Benefits of creating online courses for training employees yourself;
  • Steps and tricks for creating efficient online courses for your employees.

We’ll tell you everything you need to know to make your team set for success and walk you through each stage. Let’s dive in!

Why do courses for employee training matter?

But, first things first. Let’s try to understand the importance of employee training before we move on.

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s hard to imagine how busy you and your employees are every single day. Having so much stuff going on endlessly barely leaves any time for training. But, if employee training isn’t one of your priorities, you’re failing.

Why?

Whether it is a global IT corporation, an online writing service that offers students to order an essay online, or any other organisation, it is the company’s staff that is driving success. But, no matter how skilled your staff is, the skills and knowledge have a tendency to fade away as trends, technology, and other circumstances change. So, continuous learning is a must.

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Namely, employee training can ensure the following benefits:

  • It boosts employees’ confidence;
  • It allows reduced supervision;
  • It boosts skills and knowledge;
  • It stimulates the uniformity of the work process;
  • It leads to higher productivity and better performance.

And there are more advantages. The main point is that employee training is an integral part of the successful operation and scalability of every business. So, it’s undeniable that you should integrate training if you still haven’t, and we’ll walk you through every stage of the process.

Benefits of creating online courses yourself

So, it’s clear that employee training is crucial for every business. But, today, there are so many training and development programs out there that it may not be clear why you should bother to create courses for employee training yourself.

This concern is reasonable. But, let us assure you that there is a number of reasons to take care of everything yourself, and we’ll quickly go through a few key ones.

First of all, you know your team’s weak and strong points better than anyone else. That is, you know exactly what to focus on in the employee training strategy in order to maximise the outcomes.

The second big reason is that by creating the courses yourself, you maintain full control. This implies having full control in terms of content, methodology, activities, scope, intensity, and other factors.

This enables you to personalise the program to match the unique needs and wishes of your employees. The best thing is you can use the available online course platforms to quickly create and manage your course.

The last reason is that once you have a number of well-organised online courses for employee training, you can deliver it to your staff right when they need it. Simply put, it saves your time and effort in the long-run. While integrating a ready-made course always takes time and lots of negotiation, these issues vanish if you are using custom-made courses for training your employees.

Steps to create online courses for staff training

Now that you know about the benefits of creating training programs yourself let’s walk through the steps that will help you create effective online courses for employee training with ease.

Set learning goals

In order to be effective, every online (as well as offline) course needs well-defined learning goals.

To define the right learning objectives, you should first identify your purpose. Think of how you want a specific course to contribute to attaining your organisation’s business goals. Determine what knowledge and skills you want to deliver through the course. Also, it will give you some ideas on the scope of this course. And, finally, it will let you set specific goals.

Why is it so important? Setting measurable goals will give your employees a sense of purpose, help them maintain motivation, and also help you measure the results of training. Together, these factors will ensure the success of your course.

Determine the profile of learners

To ensure the best results, you should tailor each course to the specific needs of different employee personas. To do this, you should outline the profiles of your learners. Base these profiles on various identifiable factors such as gender, age, level of qualification, speciality, interests, and others.

Quick questions to get on track:

  • Who will be taking the course you’ll create?
  • What would these people want or need to learn?
  • What learning method would be preferable for them?

This trick will help you to define and deliver the right course content to the right people. Thus, making your courses engaging and effective for all staff members.

Pick the main topic

The main thing that distinguishes effective online courses for employee training from ineffective ones is that the first ones solve the needs or issues in your business. To ensure this, you need to have a clearly-stated topic for every course you create.

To determine your topic, you should first assess your business and overall employee performance. Identify if any pressing issues need a solution. Maybe there are some needs that you failed to cover so far. Or maybe there are any gaps in your employees’ skills and knowledge that you’d like to fill. Use it as a basis when defining a course topic.

Let’s consider two examples:

  1. Let’s say your customer retention rate is low. In this scenario, your business need is to improve this indicator. Based on this, you can define that your team has a gap in customer service. Respectively, the primary topic of your course should be customer service.
  2. There is a new trend in your industry that your employees are yet not familiar with. In order to stay competitive and reach business goals, you need to educate your staff about the new trend, and this is a perfect topic for your next course.

Based on these examples and everything we discussed earlier, we can outline the two key factors for choosing the right course topic: 1) identifying business needs and issues that require a solution, and 2) focusing on the skills and knowledge gaps that your team has.

Online Courses for Employee Training

Image: Pexels

Collect relevant course materials

It’s great if you have personal expertise and experience to share. However, one thing you need to keep in mind is that not all courses for employee training have to be created from scratch. That is, you are free to use the resources your organisation already has (e.g., workbooks, manuals, presentations, etc.), as well as other external materials.

So, your next step is to collect relevant materials. Start by analysing the sources you have. Various corporate materials can become a great addition to the content of your course. Next, check the web for additional materials. Some things to look for are research reports, journal articles, video lectures, etc.

Create a plan

When you have all the materials you need, you can go to planning your online course. This step is crucial for giving your course a logical structure.

You need to divide your course into modules. These are smaller subtopics relevant to the main topic. In each module, you need to include relevant theoretical materials and practical tasks.

Pro tip: Make your modules progressive. This means that the course’s difficulty should increase as learners proceed. This will help you create a better learning path and also stimulate better retention of information as your employees will need to use the skills and knowledge they gained in each module to progress in all subsequent modules. 

At the end of each module and the whole course, you can also include some forms of knowledge assessments such as quizzes, tests, or surveys. This will let your employees use the newly-gained knowledge and receive feedback. And, for you personally, such blocks will give an opportunity to track the employees’ progress.

Create the content

Finally, you can create the content for your online course. When you have a detailed plan and all the necessary materials, it shouldn’t be hard.

All you need is to organise everything you have into modules according to the course structure you already have. You can create your content from scratch or use free PowerPoint templates from the Internet. Whatever you do, the key tip is to keep your goals in mind.

Pro tip: Focus on making the content of your course interesting. Banal lack of interest is one of the primary factors that hold employees back from attending the training and showing good performance. There are also a few other roadblocks. You can read more about them in the post “Why Employee Training Fails and How to Prevent It.” But, uninteresting content is one of the biggest ones.

Upload the content

The final step is to upload the materials of your course to your own or an existing Learning Management System (LMS). The steps in this process can be different depending on the specific LMS you select.

To make the right choice:

  • Make sure it’s easily accessible;
  • Keep your training goals and needs in mind;
  • Look for a cloud-based LMS;
  • Make sure it is easy-to-use and allows customisation.

In Summary

Providing continuous employee training is a must for building a thriving and scalable business. Despite a wide range of ready-made training programs available out there, creating your own online courses for employee training helps you receive better results as you know your business needs and your team’s weak and strong points best.

Luckily for you, creating a perfect online course only takes seven simple steps:

  • Define learning goals;
  • Study your employee personas;
  • Pick a suitable topic;
  • Gather course materials;
  • Structure your course;
  • Create engaging content;
  • Upload your content to an LMS.

Follow these steps and our tips to maximise the effectiveness of employee training!

About the Author

Sarah is a team leader at EssayService who believes that high-quality employee training has the power to change the world. In this post, Sarah shares personal tips and tricks for creating online courses that boost employee engagement and performance.