How to put a training plan in place for your team

It isn’t just new hires that need help developing. People need training and support throughout their careers, and for your team leaders or managers, this is a vital part of their job. By creating a training plan, you will not only help your teams efficiency, but it can also improve your employees' satisfaction.

We’ve gathered a few tips to get started with a training plan for your team, inspired by The GROW Model of Coaching and Mentoring. We promise you it’s less exhausting than doing squats and sit ups.

Communication

The hardest part about putting a training plan in place can be knowing where to begin. An excellent place to start is with your employees. Identify their needs, discuss challenges, and make them assess their own work. By doing so, you will get a sense of where your employees can improve, and from here you can choose the right training to suit their needs.

By having conversations with your employees once a month you will keep yourself up to date on how they are doing. Is there anything that needs to change or are your team satisfied with how things are going? With these talks, you can make your employees feel more valued and appreciated, which increases the chances of them giving 100% at work.

Goals

For every plan you make, it is essential to have a goal to strive for. If you don’t have a purpose, how can you be sure that you achieved your plan?

When setting goals, it is a good idea to make these SMART. These goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based. By doing so, it is easier to measure the results afterwards. Set SMART goals to use your time and resources productively, focus your efforts, clarify your ideas, and last but not least, achieve what you want in life.

If you take a look at your overall business goal, what do your employees have to contribute to reaching that goal? In this way of thinking you can identify gaps in what they “can” do and what they “need” to do. One way of doing this is by mapping skills, also called skills mapping. List what knowledge your business needs to have, or somehow is missing, and make your employees set scores from one to five based on how good they are at in different areas.

Read more: Why having processes in place can help your team be more successful with customers

Coaching

By identifying what knowledge your employees are missing it is easier to push them in the right direction. Have in mind that everyone have different ways of learning, so you have to make sure that the training is flexible and suitable for most of the participants.

If you don’t have any internal coaching program, you can find a big amount of good courses online, both free and payable. If just one of your employees takes a class, they can teach the rest of the team. We’ve always been a fan of sharing is caring, and by doing this, you also save time and money.

Another way to save time is to make different templates for your own systems. Whether it is templates for meeting presentations, design templates, or a description of how to order lunch for the whole team. These templates can be modified over time when seeing what is working and what needs to be changed.

Cooperation

While sharing ideas and “how to’s” is important to enlighten your team, cooperation is another way to add value.

Even if it can be frightening to give away some of your work to another person, delegating tasks you don’t have time to do, is a positive thing for both of you and the one taking over your task. It gives you more time to focus on other crucial functions, while the task you have been giving away gets new insight. The person dealing with your task is maybe learning new skills and can use this in their own work as well.

Evaluation

Create a plan for before, during and after, to measure an employees’ progress. If your goal was to deliver effective training that helped closing gaps in skills, then you need to confirm that the training was this effective at the end.

There are four levels of evaluations:

• Employees’ reaction to training
• Employees’ actual learning
• Employees’ post-training job behaviour
• Quantifiable business results

If you determine that the training was as effective as you hoped and sat a goal for, congratulations. If the results, on the other hand, wasn’t at all as you expected, you need to revise the training and step up your game.

To sum it all up communication is an essential part of a training plan. You need to know if your actions are working or if they need to be modified. The only way to know for sure is to ask the ones involved. Setting SMART goals will help you measure the results afterwards, and it is important to have something to strive for. When you are doing a skills mapping, it makes you aware of what your employees can and can’t to, and where you need to set in more resources.

When you know the gaps, it is easier to plan different coaching programs for different employees. Templates are a good way to save time and money and can be made for everything. Sharing is caring, and cooperation is both beneficial for both yourself and the once involved. By giving away some of your tasks, you are forcing someone else to take part in your abilities. Remember to rinse, lather and repeat this training plan to make sure it stays up to date.