Technical Training for Employees: Tips & Benefits

Introduction

Technical training for employees is becoming increasingly important in today's job market.

Most companies today want to find new ways to assess employee skills and develop their own technical training programs. Employees who have technical training can perform their roles more effectively.

Besides, learning and development is now a competitive differentiator that makes a company a great place to work for most employees in 2022 — and beyond.

What is technical training?

Technical training is a way to upskill employees. It can be done in-house or outsourced and it's often used in conjunction with other training programs. The type of technical training you choose depends on your company's needs and budget—whether part of a formal course or a mentoring program.

Technical learning for employees can be one of the best and most effective methods of training to maintain knowledge and skill set. It helps provide all employees with a wide array of new skills, ideas and knowledge that will enhance their ability to perform and drive the company’s success.

Who benefits from a technical training program?

Employees benefit from increased job satisfaction, improved engagement and higher performance.
Managers benefit from a more productive workforce and better results.
The company benefits from increased productivity, improved performance and reduced turnover.

How to build robust technical training programs

Technical training may seem simple, but it can be more challenging than you think. When starting a technical training program for your employees, the last thing you want to do is start with a blank slate.

This is why it's essential to understand how different technical training programs work. Similarly, you ought to know how to develop your company's best technical training strategy and measure the essential KPIs for the training program.

Here are the simple steps to develop a robust technical training program for your employees.

1. Define the goal of your training program

The first step is determining what training your employees need and why they need it. What do you want employees to learn? What skills do they need to develop? Do they need new hardware or software?

Create a learning plan that addresses your organization's goals and the needs of employees who will participate in the program. Common technical training examples are mainly centered on helping employees to continuously adopt the latest technologies or update existing ones.

2. Decide on the level of training required for each employee

Some employees only need the basics, while others need more advanced training. Consider what each employee’s job entails and how much time they spend on each task to determine the right level of instruction for them. There are various online course platforms available to train the employees.

Before designing any programs, determine which types of employees need assistance and then provide those opportunities at appropriate times. This way, there won't be any surprises later down the road or availability issues caused by a lack of coordination within the organization structure.

3. Find who'll be responsible for the training program

Select an instructor responsible for teaching and guiding your employees through their learning process to get the most out of it. This could be someone from within your company or someone external to it who has experience teaching technical skills such as coding, etc.

They should be capable of running a standard operating procedures (SOP) training program that offers detailed step-by-step instructions. This will allow processes to be completed accurately and more consistently.

4. Use software & other tools

Technical training initiates mostly take place when there is a need for process improvement in IT. This makes it perfectly sensible to leverage employee training software to make it incredibly simple to develop, deliver and manage the training programs.

Software tools and solutions such as Scribe are built upon the idea of teaching people how to use technology effectively.

It's a step-by-step guide generator that can turn any process into visual SOPs, complete with text and annotated screenshots. Scribe is both an extension and desktop app that quickly captures your screen, making process documentation easier and faster than ever.

Develop guides for even the most complex tools. Here's a Scribe that outlines how to create a Zendesk account.

Build a robust technical training program within the Scribe platform, or integrate it with your favorite tool, wiki or knowledge base. And take advantage of Scribe's latest feature, Pages. This new feature lets you combine Scribes with images, video and more for extensive training materials and software onboarding documentation.

Here's a Scribe Page with more Zendesk processes and resources.

Scribe and Scribe Pages are also effective solutions you can integrate with other technical training initiatives to automate process documentation and improve employee retention, engagement and performance.

According to the Quality Assurance team at Learning Pool, Scribe has helped them save time by eliminating tedious process documentation.

“Time savings is the most important thing for us. It’s been massive. I can record 150 steps in five minutes with Scribe," explains Daniel Owen, a Quality Assurance Analyst at Learning Pool.

To build a robust technical training program using Scribe in your company, follow these steps:

Create a Scribe account.
Create Scribes and Pages for each course.
Track if/how your employees engage with the content.

In short: you can use Scribe to create high-fidelity content that your employees can use to learn new skills.

5. Create simple & interactive training content

Technical training programs, in most cases, will include modules on new software training, enterprise applications, and complex processes. HR and L&D teams must choose interactive methods to deliver technical training to keep learners engaged and promote interaction between training and employees.

The best way is to choose appropriate elements based on your objectives and audience. For example, you can leverage video-based training to keep your employees in charge of their learning. You can also include quizzes and assessments in the training module to keep the learning process engaging.

6. Create, schedule & implement the action plan

Create an action plan that outlines how you will meet these training goals. If possible, set a clear schedule so everyone knows what's going on at any given time throughout their workday or week.

An excellent way to start is to create a training manual that your team can count on. Make relevant follow-ups with the employees periodically to ensure they get the training they need and want.

What are the benefits of technical training programs to employees?

Developing technical training programs is an excellent way to hone new employees' skills or improve the existing ones. This can be in-house technical training focusing on an individual employee's specific skill set or external technical training to offer a more generalized overview for all employees within your organization.

The best part is that you can rely on technical training for technical and non-technical roles, such as management positions or support roles within an organization. Here are the key benefits of a technical training program for your employees:

1. Increased productivity

With technical training, employees can increase productivity by performing tasks more efficiently. They will also manage and complete tasks in less time and with fewer errors or mistakes. This means you will save money on your payroll costs and the time spent managing them.

2. Improved quality of work

When an employee has been trained in a new skill or job function, they are more likely to do it correctly from the start rather than learning on the job through trial and error. Your company gets better quality work at lower costs than if you had hired new employees without prior experience in those fields.

3. Reduced errors

Trained employees make fewer mistakes while working because they have learned how specific tools work together correctly.

Technical training initiatives & how to measure success

Measuring the effectiveness of your training programs is crucial when you devote significant resources, time, money, and energy to them. It’ll help you to learn the influence of training on the learner's knowledge, performance, and it’s return on investment. A technical training initiative's effectiveness depends on three factors:

Building a robust program.
Relying on effective free training manual software like Scribe.
Setting up metrics so you can track progress over time.

A robust technical training program will help you measure success because it can be used as a framework for evaluating how your team members perform at work. You'll also see the gaps between how your team members perform in their current roles and how they could perform if they were appropriately trained.

A good way to measure effectiveness of training is by looking at factors such as:

How much time did employees spend on the initiative?
How many people participated in the initiative?
How many people were engaged throughout the program?

Final thoughts: implementing technical trainings

Technical learning allows employees to become more proficient in their roles per the organizational requirements. Starting and developing a robust technical training program for your employees can be daunting. However, it doesn't have to be if you leverage the right tools, such as Scribe. This tool will allow you to share information and collaborate more effectively with your employees across multiple locations, departments, or even across different companies altogether.

Save 20+ hours a month explaining, training & answering quick questions. Send a Scribe instead.

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