12 Types of Employee Training Programs and Their Benefits

Whether you’re an HR manager, supervisor, or executive, understanding how to support and develop your workforce is essential. Employee training programs are key to helping workers acquire the skills and knowledge they need to succeed, enhancing the employee experience and fostering career growth.

These programs address skills gaps within your organization, saving time and resources by upskilling current employees rather than hiring new ones. In a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 63% of companies said that they see ROI from skills-based training. Sixty-two percent said that it directly addresses costly skills gaps. LinkedIn Learning research shows that 7 in 10 employees say that L&D improves their sense of connection to their organization. Eight in 10 say that learning gives purpose to their work.

However, implementing effective training programs can be challenging. It’s crucial to select the right programs tailored to your organization’s needs. This guide will explore 12 types of training programs, from onboarding to leadership development, and explain how software can streamline the process by structuring learning and automating tasks.

Read on to discover how these training programs can help you upskill your workforce, retain talent, and enhance productivity.

In This Article

12 Types of Employee Training Programs

Employee training programs encompass everything from new hire orientation to industry-specific safety training. These programs can be administered in person, virtually, one-on-one, in groups, live, or asynchronously. Here’s an overview of a dozen types of employee training programs that can make a difference at your company.

1. Orientation

The first days on the job can be anxiety-inducing for new hires, no matter how much work your HR team puts in ahead of time to make them feel welcome. Employee orientation soothes frazzled nerves and sets the tone for a successful onboarding program.

Orientation is a short introduction to the company and the new hire’s role. And we do mean short – typically, orientation training takes only a few days at most. During this time, plan to provide basic information about the job’s duties and responsibilities, its reporting structure, and the employee’s new team, as well as a high-level overview of the company’s goals and values.

Perhaps most importantly, orientation is when your new teammate gets access to the tools and technology they need to do their job. If they’re on-site, this might mean keycards or badges, as well as computers, mobile devices, tools, software, or company vehicles. If they work remotely, expect to set aside time for the hire to connect virtually and get the technical support they need to ensure smooth communication from their home office or wherever else they get the job done.

2. Onboarding

Many people confuse onboarding with orientation. This confusion may be why so many onboarding programs fail. According to Gallup, only 1 in 10 employees agree that their employer does a good job onboarding new hires.

A solid onboarding program is an ongoing process that can last from a few weeks to several months or even a year. The purpose of onboarding is to share your company’s values and goals, as well as provide deeper insight into the employee’s role in your organization. By the end of the process, the new hire should have a sense of how they can tangibly contribute to your organization’s mission.

A typical onboarding program will include:

• Skills training, which can take the form of one-on-one teaching, virtual training programs, or seminars.

• Structured meetings with managers, mentors, and colleagues to set goals and clarify expectations.

• Setting and tracking metrics to evaluate the success of the program. These should include retention rates, input from managers on how well the new hire is settling into their role, and feedback from the new hire about the onboarding process.

3. Compliance Training

Compliance training teaches employees how to comply with legal requirements and follow company policy. In addition to preventing lawsuits or regulatory issues, compliance training ensures that teams work well together in an environment that’s safe, respectful, and fair.

Compliance training can involve everything from self-directed online tutorials, to off-site seminars, to shadowing other team members. Your company’s compliance needs will vary depending on its industry and location, and goals. These are a few of the most common kinds of compliance training:

• Industry-specific regulatory compliance training, including Sarbanes-Oxley certification for employees in finance and HIPAA compliance training for those in the healthcare field.

• OSHA training to help employees stay safe on the job.

• Anti-harassment training to prevent bullying in the workplace.

• Artificial intelligence training to ensure your team is following AI best practices.

4. Team Training

Team training is just what it sounds like: a structured program to help your employees work well together as a functional unit. This type of training is especially important in the event of a major organizational upheaval like a merger, layoff, or other restructuring. However, it can be beneficial at any point in your company’s lifecycle.

Some organizations may choose to structure team training around input from employee surveys, while others may build their program from the top down to support corporate goals. If there are areas of your business you know need improvement, start there. For example, low customer satisfaction or NPS scores would call for more training for the customer service team. A high accident rate signals the importance of additional safety training. Regardless of the training you provide, follow-up is important to ensure that participants receive actionable takeaways.

5. Product Training

Product training helps employees understand your company’s products and services inside and out. This type of training is generally given to sales representatives, customer service or technical support, the product team, and marketing. You may also choose to provide product training as part of the onboarding process for all new employees to ensure that every new hire can act as an advocate for your company’s offerings.

The benefits of product training go beyond helping your workers understand what they’re selling, marketing, or supporting. However, by facilitating a deep understanding of your products and services, you’re creating an entire organization of product testers and innovators. Having more minds focused on your company’s most important products will speed up

6. Leadership Training

A company is only as good as its leaders. Leadership training ensures that the managers who direct your teams are skilled, focused, and aligned with the company’s goals. Organizations should target their leadership training initiatives broadly, offering programs that meet the needs of new managers, experienced leaders, and employees who have leadership potential as identified through the succession planning process. This keeps current leadership up to date on the needs of your evolving workforce while ensuring your company has a fresh class of leaders ready to take the reins.

Leadership training can take several forms, including group or individual mentorship programs, leadership coaching with professional trainers, and job shadowing. Regardless of specifics, quality leadership training programs lead to better business outcomes, create stronger teams, and boost employee retention and morale.

7. Technical Skills Training

Organizations often include some form of technical skills training as part of their onboarding program, but these programs can be useful at any point during a worker’s career. Technical skills training includes instruction on any ability, tool, or program used to complete a job. For knowledge workers, technical skills training will most likely focus on the software they use each day. For employees in manufacturing, construction, or other skilled trades, training may encompass anything from the use of specialized equipment to advanced professional techniques.

Skills training can involve a variety of formats, including:

• One-on-one or group training that takes place either in person or virtually via video conferencing.

• Self-directed online learning, often with interactive quiz or gamification features.

8. Soft Skills Training

Soft skills help employees interact with colleagues more effectively, with a focus on communication, teamwork, and problem-solving. Soft skills training helps teams work well together and creates a more harmonious, productive work environment.

Because soft skills are more difficult to tie directly to KPIs, it’s tempting to give them short shrift when you’re planning corporate training programs. However, research suggests that people skills are just as crucial to productivity and achievement as technical skills.

Mission-critical soft skills include:

• Active listening

• Collaboration

• Conflict resolution

• Empathy and emotional intelligence

• Flexibility

• Organization

• Presentation

• Time management

While all soft skills are useful to some extent, regardless of job type or industry, your program’s priorities should align with current and future business goals. To ensure effectiveness, begin program planning with an assessment of necessary soft skills for each job. Then, follow up with employee assessments to set specific goals for future training sessions.

9. Quality Assurance Training

Quality assurance helps your company consistently deliver the best possible products and services to its customers. Quality assurance training guarantees that employees involved in QA understand how the process works and how to ensure that the company’s products meet applicable standards.

It’s important to differentiate between quality assurance training and quality control training. The former focuses on quality during product development, while the latter reviews products and services after completion and before delivery to clients or customers.

Quality assurance training has many benefits, including improved production processes, fewer defects, and streamlined product development. It also gives QA team members the knowledge of relevant regulations, testing standards, and documentation procedures they need to succeed.

10. Sales Training

To remain effective, your sales team needs the opportunity to regularly refresh its skills. Sales training can include everything from mastering new sales methods, to learning how to use sales platforms, to improving soft skills like active listening. The best sales training programs have an interactive element that allows sellers to share knowledge and learn from each other, while receiving instruction in new tools and techniques.

You might develop separate focus areas in your program for different members of the sales team, like account executives, customer service reps, and sales managers. Your program might also teach some skills across the board. For example, just about every member of the sales team will benefit from learning more about product and service features or developing improved customer service or upselling skills.

11. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Training

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training programs help companies create work environments that are supportive of employees of all cultures and backgrounds. DEI programs aren’t just an employee benefit. Research shows companies that prioritize DEI initiatives reduce employee attrition by 50% and increase worker motivation by a quarter. Diverse organizations are also more likely to be profitable than their less diverse competitors.

DEI learning initiatives include educating workers on unconscious bias, encouraging empathy and active listening, and cultural competency training. Deliver training in different formats to meet the learning styles of your team. And lastly, provide multiple formats for employees to ask questions and share feedback — including anonymous feedback — so team members feel safe asking for the support they need.

12. Safety Training

Safety training is valuable, even if your organization isn’t involved in riskier industries like manufacturing, construction, or healthcare. In fact, most private-sector employers in the U.S. are required to display OSHA’s Job Safety and Your Health: It’s the Law poster in a prominent location in their place of business.

The specific type of safety training your organization provides will depend on your industry and the hazards involved. For example, healthcare employers may be required to adhere to OSHA’s Bloodborne Pathogens and Medical and First Aid standards, as well as providing appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) and training on its use. Meanwhile, food service employers should plan to administer food safety training to all personnel.

To create a safety training program for your organization, consider the regulations in your industry, areas in which you know employees need further training, and the method of delivery that will work best for your team. Using examples from the workplace and continually connecting how employees will benefit from greater safety standards can help improve adherence.

Benefits of Employee Training Programs

Employee training programs have benefits for both employers and staff including higher profits, better employee retention, and a more highly skilled workforce.

1. Better Employee Experience

Employees want training and development opportunities – and they’re willing to change jobs to get them. According to research from TalentLMS and Vyond, 66% of employees say that they need new skills to do their jobs and 41% would change jobs to get access to skills development.

By providing ongoing training, your company can show employees that you support their career development. Keep the employee experience in mind: curating the right development opportunities avoids overwhelming workers with too many choices and directs them to experiences that will build their careers while achieving the company’s goals.

The result of successful training programs? Employees feel a greater sense of connection and purpose in their work.

2. A Higher-Skilled Workforce

Nearly half of workers will need to be retrained over the next five years, according to research from the World Economic Forum. In-demand talents are expected to include people skills as well as technical skills related to AI, machine learning, and data analysis.

Regular employee training improves employees’ soft skills as well as their technical skill sets. In fact, LinkedIn data shows that members of its network with both soft and hard skills are 8% more likely to get promoted than those with just hard skills.

A highly skilled workforce means that employees have the knowledge and tools to be successful in their roles. Closing skills gaps unlocks the potential of employees, teams, and the organization.

3. Greater Employee Retention

Gallup reports that companies that invest in employee training and development are twice as likely to retain their employees as those that don’t offer this support. Further, their data shows that organizations with employee training programs are 11% more profitable than their competitors.

The link between employee training and retention isn’t hard to draw. It makes sense that employees who are supported are happy in their role and thus are willing to stay at an organization for longer.

4. More Productivity and Efficiency

Employee training programs support productivity in several ways:

• Closing skills gaps. IDC Research predicts that a global IT skills shortage will affect 9 out of 10 organizations by 2026, costing $5.5 trillion due to lost revenue and quality issues. Addressing skills gaps proactively by upskilling your current workforce can prevent these issues from hitting your bottom line – and put you ahead of the competition.

• Maximizing efficiency. By taking advantage of employees’ curiosity, proactivity, and capacity to learn, your organization can put tools in the hands of the workers who are best able to use them.

• Attracting motivated workers. The competition for the most highly skilled workers is always fierce. By offering skills training, your organization is providing a benefit that the best talent is looking for.

Employee Training Program Best Practices

Building an effective employee training program doesn’t have to be time-consuming or expensive. Keep these guidelines in mind to speedily develop programs that meet the needs of your organization and your workforce.

Tie Training Activity to Outcomes

What does your training program offer to participants? Be clear about the benefits of each activity and the expected outcome. For example, if 20% of participants in this program have gone on to receive a promotion or raise in the next year, be sure to mention that.

Be as specific as possible about the benefits of each training activity and quantify results in terms that are most meaningful to employees. Make sure that you’re drawing a clear line between the activity and the result. Give managers the capability to have informed conversations about how learning can impact employees’ career aspirations – and don’t forget to train managers on communicating these results.

Make Training Engaging

Employees want training, but no one wants to sit in a cubicle for hours, staring at a static presentation on a monitor – or worse yet, in a crowded conference room, listening to an uninspired speaker drone on about statistics.

Personalize your training to each employee’s needs, considering their specific duties, roles, and their individual learning style. Make training dynamic and interactive by incorporating employee feedback and gamifying results. In one study, using a training app with video-game-like features like points, competition, and instant feedback improved fee collection by 25%, the number of clients by 16%, and new client opportunities by 22%.

You can also go beyond traditional, lackluster training by incorporating short-term work, gig work, and mentorship into an employee’s training program. Internal gigs – short-term assignments based on projects – boost engagement and help employees clearly define their career paths within the organization.

Leverage Technology

Technology can streamline the development of your training programs and ensure more effective, measurable outcomes. It’s all about finding the tools that will help your team identify learning opportunities and efficiently develop and schedule the relevant training.

The right software helps you leverage your workforce’s existing skill base, identify opportunities for upskilling and reskilling, administer the appropriate training, and measure the effectiveness of your program,ideally without a lot of data mining by leveraging sophisticated AI features.

Learn how workforce intelligence can help you enable talent mobility and workforce career development at scale: Upskilling, Reskilling, and Evolving Your Talent with Workforce Intelligence

Establish Your Goals

As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Set goals for your employee training program that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Your company’s training objectives will be as individual as your organization’s values and might include upskilling or reskilling employees to better meet current and anticipated company needs, developing defined career paths for each role at your business, and improving succession planning.

How To Measure the Success of Employee Training Programs

How will you know when your training program is a success? Start by understanding what your initiative is meant to achieve – a solution for the pain points that inspired you to build an employee training program in the first place. Then, quantify your goal by selecting, tracking, and, when necessary, adjusting metrics.

Some metrics will be more clear-cut than others. For example, if you’re trying to measure the impact of your training initiatives on employee retention, you can parse the data by looking at new hires who participated in the program versus those that didn’t. Then, track how many participants stay with your organization after a set period – whether that’s six months, two years, or five years – and compare that to the retention rate for your entire organization or the relevant department or team.

On the other hand, evaluating the effect of training programs on employee engagement is more complex. You can get at this metric by conducting frequent employee surveys focused on the drivers of engagement. Use a Likert scale with a range of numbers that reflect how closely an employee agrees with a given statement, and decide what constitutes an acceptable threshold for a positive response. For instance, if you have a survey question along the lines of “My manager supports my career development” and answers ranging from 1 (never) to 5 (continuously), you might decide that 4 (most of the time) or above count as good outcomes.

Before you start collecting the necessary data - whether through employee surveys or by leveraging other feedback channels - don’t forget to obtain a baseline reading from participants before they start training.

Make sure you offer anonymous feedback channels to ensure that employees are honest and willing to respond. You can even use intelligent HR chatbots to prompt team members to provide feedback and see how they’re feeling during the week.

Finally, don’t try to make the data fit the narrative you’d hoped to find. Be prepared to use what you’ve learned to recalibrate your training program when necessary, and incorporate new key performance indicators (KPIs) and business goals as your company and its industry evolve.

Examples of Successful Employee Training Programs

Unsurprisingly, some of the most successful companies in the world have made significant investments in employee training programs – with compelling results.

Amazon

Amazon has made a $1.2 billion commitment to upskilling and reskilling 300,000 employees for roles in cloud computing, data technology, and software development. Amazon’s program stands out from the competition by going beyond roles within the organization. One of its training initiatives, Career Choice, offers prepaid tuition for education and training in high-demand occupations like medical assistant, nurse, aircraft mechanic, and commercial truck driver.

Bank of America

Bank of America offers several professional development tracks and tools as part of its training program, The Academy. Features include the Career Path Tool, which helps employees explore different roles and job openings at BOA; myCareer, the company’s internal career site; and tuition reimbursement for career-related training and education.

The company also sponsors several leadership programs including the Women’s Executive Development Program, which focuses on high-potential future leaders. The program offers virtual development sessions, leadership coaching, and assessments.

Lumen

Customer service doesn’t just mean serving your company’s external clients. For growing multinational organizations like the tech company Lumen, it means driving enhanced employee experiences, as well.

Lumen used Phenom Talent Marketplace and Phenom Referrals to make it easier for employees to find opportunities and submit referrals for open roles. The result? Lumen is now able to fill up to 35% of new job openings with internal hires, saving time, money, and effort, while ensuring that institutional knowledge stays in-house.

Build Better Employee Training Programs With Phenom

Employee training programs can close skills gaps, attract and retain top talent, and boost productivity and profitability. Whether you’re trying to build a leadership pipeline, create a supportive employee experience, or ensure an inclusive work environment, there’s an employee training program for your needs.

Today’s employers have obstacles and opportunities that they could only imagine a few years ago. By learning about the different kinds of training tools available, you can determine what your L&D initiative should involve. It’s all about understanding your options in the context of your needs, goals, and current workforce capabilities.

Phenom can help you build the employee training program that will help you evolve your workforce to meet tomorrow’s challenges:

• Phenom helps companies identify training opportunities for their employees and provide personalized development plans.

• Phenom helps leaders create career paths for ongoing employee training and development.

• Phenom provides data on the strengths and opportunities of a company’s talent pool and closes skills gaps for a more successful workforce.

Curious about how we can help your organization create a personalized employee training program that’s specific to your needs and values?

• Learn more about the Phenom Talent Marketplace (webinar) today

• Or book a demo and try Phenom for yourself