How to Improve the Effectiveness of Your Employee Training Program with Training Automation

As a manager or HR leader, you understand the importance of training your employees. You know it's less expensive to train a current employee than to hire a new one.

And that employees who receive continuous training find it beneficial to their productivity, engagement, job satisfaction, and professional development and are more likely to stay with a company.

You might have even designed a corporate training program that allowed your company and employees to enjoy these rewards in the past.

But now your company is growing, you are hiring talent from across the world, and the cracks in your training methods are starting to show.

It's getting more challenging for you to deliver consistent, relevant, engaging and effective training to new and existing hires at a quick pace. You can't even find the time for post-training assessment or giving and collecting feedback.

There's a simple solution to this problem: training automation.

All you need is the right automation features and an automated training management system to revive your processes and workforce.

💪 What is training automation?

Automating your HR workflow is ideal for handing over manual, tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming administrative tasks to software. Your training workflows can also benefit from automation. 

Training automation takes your employee training process and makes it more effective, efficient, scalable, and able to run by itself.

For example, instead of manually overseeing processes like:

• preboarding, 
• Onboarding,
• managing payroll, 
• filing taxes, and 
• customizing training plans for each department,

Your people ops team can delegate these tasks to an automation platform.

"Employees expect opportunities to learn and grow without limitations, managers who understand individual working styles and environments, and companies that offer flexibility as a standard of employment." Gogi Anand, Senior People Science Consultant, LinkedIn.

Delegating (tedious) tasks frees time to channel into more valuable tasks like analyzing training needs, defining learning goals, designing course materials, and creating quality content.

So, you can spend less time on small and repetitive admin tasks and more on meeting employee expectations for flexible, effective and qualitative training opportunities. 

Training automation takes all the disorder, stress, and roadblocks out of your training process by replacing traditional systems—countless spreadsheets, PDFs, emails, and tools—with a system that runs smoothly with minimal human intervention.

👨‍🏫 What is an automated course?

An automated course is any course designed, created, rolled out, measured, and converted from static content to interactive formats using the power of automation software.

From a provider perspective, an automated course allows for an online learning experience with multiple benefits. You can bring down the time it takes to provide flexible and personalized training, intervention, and targeted support to your workers. And you can do it all as seamlessly as possible.

"What surprised me most was that you can automate so much without sacrificing experience. We are sending people trackable tasks, engaging content, and fun reminders via Slack. All with a single click." Markus Schwarz, People Experience Manager at Storyblok.

💼 5 Ways training automation benefits your business

A lot of work goes into developing and maintaining a successful training program. The hours and effort required to pull it off can strain even the most hardworking HR department.

When this happens, your company can suffer huge financial losses, legal repercussions, lower employee morale, and widening skill gaps.

With training automation software, you can bypass these potential setbacks and reap essential rewards.

1. Streamlined employee onboarding processes

Make all the information you have created to help new hires get up to speed on what your company is about and how they can contribute to its goals and broader vision instantly accessible to all stakeholders.

This way, you won't have to manually design, manage, and repeat your onboarding process for every newbie.

You only have to lay down the process once, and your training management software will roll it out whenever a new employee needs onboarding.

2. Elimination of repetitive efforts

Without training automation, you would spend week after week enrolling employees for training, tracking course progress, and updating training records until you grow weary or tune out.

You would use up hours:

- messaging employees about required training; 

- sending relevant learning materials; 

- setting up tasks; 

- monitoring regulatory compliance, and 

- doing other back-office tasks.

Investing in automated training allows you to easily and quickly configure everyday repetitive tasks to run independently, automatically, and more efficiently.

Now you can redirect your energy into higher-value activities like formulating training strategies and designing effective programs.

3. Maximum time savings and reduced training costs

Imagine planning a seminar or lecture to train hundreds or thousands of employees to use new technology.

You would have to find and rent a venue big enough to take everyone and arrange for transportation, food, and instructors.

Let's not forget that you will also keep employees from doing their work, which means your business won't be running optimally or making money during that time.

All of this costs your company serious bucks and time. But by automating your training, all your workers will need is their computer, an internet connection, and some free time to complete the training.

So not only are you ensuring less time spent away from productive tasks, but also overall cost savings.

4. Anticipating employees' learning needs

It is your responsibility to help your workers gain new skills and knowledge at the right time to grow their careers and keep up with the changes in their field.

You can combine employee data (work profiles, performance reviews, etc.) from your HR systems with learning data and assessment results from your training automation software to analyze skill levels and identify skill gaps and learning needs.

Armed with this information, you can instantly deliver relevant courses to different employees that need upskilling or reskilling at the click of a button. 

5. Improved training efficiency

Successful training programs are not built in a day. 

It takes practice and constant refining to create learning experiences that are interesting, engaging, impactful, and relevant.

For example, incorporating mobile microlearning in your training program can lead to a four times increase in engagement rates. And even better, it also leads to 50% better knowledge retention compared to traditional e-learning tools. 

➡️ Discover how Freeletics combines different learning techniques to increase efficiency. As a result, 100% of learners feel supported in their growth and development. 

Employee training automation also allows you to set up automated surveys to monitor engagement and collect feedback along the training journey. It even helps you evaluate your survey results and easily create reports that you can use to:

• streamline processes;
• identify areas of improvement;
• judge the strength of your training process;
• address problems before they become an issue;
• reduce errors and risks of non-compliance;
• modify training activities to suit employees learning needs or preferences.

👩‍💼 5 Reasons why your employees will prefer automated training

Your company isn't the only one who will enjoy the benefits of automating your training program. It also directly impacts your employees and transforms their learning and development experience in multiple ways.

 1. Learning becomes self-driven

Automated training puts employees in the front seat and gives them the power to control how, when, and where they learn. As a result, they can learn and grow their skills at a pace that works for them, their schedule, and their ambitions.

All they have to do is log into their personalized training portals to see the learning materials and unmissable milestones you have created for them.

They can track their progress, request further training, or even decide on their own to take other non-required courses that catch their interest.

 2. More feedback, more often

How well are employees progressing along their learning path?

What skill gaps do they have?

What areas of the course are they struggling with, or do they need to devote more attention to so they can excel in the future?

How are their current learning strategies working for them?

Without individualized feedback, your employees won't be able to answer these questions. Unfortunately, this means they can't improve, and you can't effectively guide them to reach personal and mandatory learning goals.

With an automated training system, you can easily create quizzes and tests to assess what trainees have learned. Then generate feedback automatically based on how correctly they answered each question.

 3. Possibility to learn in the flow of work

When you drag employees away from their desks or the tasks they are engaged in to attend training, you mess with their productivity and workflow.

On the other hand, with automation, you can train your employees during their day-to-day work and bring added flexibility to their learning experience. 

So instead of finding a separate time outside of work to learn, automated training helps you and your employees incorporate learning in the flow of work into their routines with:

• Infographics;
• Social media threads;
• Interactive quizzes;
• Drip campaigns;
• Collaborative learning;
• Gamification;
• Microsoft Teams or Slack nudges;
• Pop-up microlearning content, etc.

4. Automated recognition increases engagement

Employees don't want to toil in the dark without recognition for the work they are putting in or for what they have achieved.

If you don't give them the encouragement and appreciation they desire, they will go find it in another company.

An automated training management system with certification and gamification features like leaderboards, badges, levels, points, certificates, and rewards makes it easy to recognize and praise employees when they hit a learning milestone.

This validation of their efforts will push them to keep going and even do better next time around.

5. Consistent and reliable experiences for learners

The great thing about automated training is that it removes inconsistencies in your employees' training experiences.

Everyone receives the same guidelines, content, and overall experience regardless of where they are.

No one gets left behind or gets more course materials and learning time than the next person.

Admins and trainees won't need to dig through various files and folders to find the courses or information they need because it will be at their fingertips.

You can easily update your training automation platform whenever your company policies or processes evolve. Everyone with access will be able to see the changes right away.

🖥️ What to look for in training automation software

Whether you are reviewing your current training software or shopping for a new one, here are some core features that any effective automated training management system (TMS) should have to support your training efforts:

• Course creation and design - Your training automation software must allow you to design, create, store, and deliver relevant courses to your employees at the right times. It should come with the option of building new courses from scratch and importing and editing existing course materials. Plus, make sure it supports modern formats, such as behavioral formats (e.g. microlearning), social learning, and spaced repetition.
• Learner performance assessment - A good TMS should allow employees to review their progress and test their knowledge throughout the learning journey.
• Customizable training plans - With a TMS, managing training requirements for individual employees or entire teams is easy and seamless. It should enable you to create personalized profiles for every trainee and administrator. Or customize your training channels, frequency, and duration based on employee preferences.
• Tracking and reporting - Choose a training automation software that helps you track and study your employees' learning behavior and performance via custom reports.
• Scalability - You won't have to go through the stress of researching, purchasing, and implementing a new software solution every time your company expands.

What is training (automation) software best for?

Use your training automation software to manage your entire training administration process on the admin end and your learning and development process on the employee end.

It helps you meet your company's training needs and requirements by taking over and automating how you design courses, offer blended learning, and deploy training initiatives.

You can use it to streamline how you show trainees' recognition, issue certificates, monitor learning progress, communicate and engage employees, and generate training reports.

Tip: You can use your training automation software to target specific individuals or teams with role-based development opportunities such as leadership training, sales training, and more.

⚙️ 8 Steps to implementing training automation

Ready to turn your employee training program into a well-oiled machine that makes learning a beloved part of your workplace culture?

Follow these steps to unlock the benefits of automated training for your business and employees.

1. Start with choosing your automated training software

The training automation system you choose will either limit your training program or help it meet and exceed expectations.

There are many options in the market, and some of them will offer you a superior and wider range of features than others.

To pick the right training software for your company, you need to consider the following:

• The type of training content your employees prefer, e.g. slides, video tutorials, webinars, and graphics.
• The methods or channels you plan to use to deliver the content, e.g. slack, email, and pop-ups.
• Your training approach — will you opt for blended, asynchronous, social, or e-learning?
• The size of your company and your projected growth rate.

Once you have assessed your training automation needs, it will be easier to identify a tool that checks all or most of your boxes.

2. Set training objectives

What do you want to achieve with your workplace training program?

If you don't have a goal you are working towards, you could end up supplying your workers with useless information. Even worse, you deliver information irrelevant to their role or your business—what a waste of time and opportunity that would be.

You can avoid this outcome by identifying the skills and knowledge gaps in your company that prevent employees from staying competitive, well-rounded and advancing in their roles.

3. Create reusable course templates

You can automate your course creation and management process by creating templates that you can reuse or edit over and over. This saves you the trouble of starting from scratch whenever you want to add a similar course or training materials.

So all you need to do is edit the template with the information specific to each course. Add the instructors, date, and time, and it will be good to go.

If the training automation software you use comes with templates, customize them to your needs.

4. Design and develop training materials

Your employees shouldn't have to search for the necessary training materials.

For your program to be effective and learner-driven, you must create an online repository for all relevant courses and materials trainees need. Then, make sure they easily access them whenever needed.

To do this, you need to:

• Decide on your training goals and what you want to teach, then use that to figure out the desired outcomes of each course.
• Thoroughly research your chosen topic and use the insights you gather to map out a course outline.
• Build out the outline by crafting the content for each course segment.

5. Automate workflows

It's time to take your training automation software for a spin by automating aspects of your HR and L&D processes that are repetitive and time-consuming.

For example, the following training admin communication and tasks are perfect candidates for automation.

→ Set up automated surveys: Automatically send out surveys at the end of every course to get instant employee reactions and find out what they would like to improve.

→ Set up automated communication triggers: These are useful for informing trainees of a new training track assignment, being late on a task, or approaching the course deadline.

→ Automated training certificates: Program your TMS to auto-issue template-based or customized certificates whenever a trainee completes all the required learning activities.

→ Automate training record management - Auto-assign courses to employees, analyze training results, and create easily searchable records and reports.

→ Automated feedback collection - Monitor quiz results, module completion times and results. Then use these insights to adjust the training material to learners' needs.

6. Upload the content

Add all your training content from online courses to other learning materials such as PDFs, videos, audio files, word documents, and interactive flipbooks to your TMS.

Tip: The best automation systems enable you to use different content types in one learning track or training course.

After creating a course or track, you can define the course sequence, set up a schedule, and the order in which trainees can view courses or progress through the track.

7. Track progress and effectiveness

Your work doesn't end after launching your automated training program. You still need to monitor trainees' performances, test scores, course completion rates, and training results.

Take advantage of your learning management system's tracking, analytics, and reporting features, which will do all the groundwork for you.

‍Tip: The more advanced your software's reporting tools are, the better insights you will get.

Better insights mean a more robust understanding of what's working or not working in your training strategy. This knowledge will allow you to make changes to increase the effectiveness of your program.

8. Acknowledge trainee achievements

Showering your employees with feedback, recognition, and rewards is the trick to motivating them to keep learning and improving their skills.

Think outside the box and come up with exciting ways to pull this off. 

For example, you can gamify the training process to boost engagement and spark friendly competition.

Award badges and certificates to trainees to boost their sense of accomplishment and push them to complete courses.

💡 7 Bonus tips for implementing training automation

Tip #1: Start small, then scale. 

Run a pilot project with a specific team or a specific course. Then, use the learnings from the pilot to facilitate your training planning.

Tip #2: Create experiments to test the effect of different strategies. 

For example, you can use two content types in a testing phase. You will understand which supports better knowledge retention after a given period.

Tip #3: Cater to different learning styles by incorporating multiple types of learning materials. 

For example, offer both video trainings and video scripts as an alternative learning method. 

Tip #4: Listen to your employees and design your training experience to suit their wants and preferences, not what you think they would want or prefer. 

Tip #5: Encourage employees to share routinely with their peers what they are learning.

Tip #6: There are insanely outdated old-fashion LMS systems out there. So make sure you get something modern and effective.

Tip #7: Clearly communicate how training belongs to a larger career development framework. Incorporate it into your employees' development plan.

➡️ Run training programs on autopilot with Zavvy

Providing your employees the training they need to reach their professional goals and move your business forward doesn't have to suck the joy out of everyone involved.

With Zavvy's intuitive learning management system, you can take the stress out of your training management process, get your employees excited about learning, and help your managers become great leaders.

Book a free demo now to discover how Zavvy can turn your training program into a success story.