Smart Scheduling Techniques for Corporate Learning and Development
Guest Post by Ciara Byrnes
Corporate learning has the potential to increase productivity, improve employee engagement, and most importantly, instill a culture of constant professional development.
A large number of today’s employers claim that learning and refining professional skills is an important factor in retaining their employees and finding new opportunities.
A company should strive to create a workplace culture that promotes professional development, both for the benefit of the employees and the company itself.
It’s tricky, however, to organize and schedule corporate professional development without obstructing regular workplace tasks and responsibilities.
So, here are a few smart scheduling techniques to set up a corporate learning program that will not impede productivity or disrupt your employees’ work-life balance.
Consult Teams to Determine the Most Optimal Time
This technique is quite self-explanatory and to be expected, but still worth a mention: consult the company’s team leads and see what they have on their plate for the near future.
If you’re launching a company-wide culture training program, it’s best to coordinate with all team leads to schedule a time when the workload is lighter.
Separate team learning and development sessions are much easier to organize.
For example, if the web development team has no major tasks for the near future, you can consult their team lead about dedicating some of their work hours to professional learning and development.
This example demonstrates why effective communication with employees and team leads is fundamental to scheduling and planning an effective training program.
There are also cases of departments anticipating new hires.
It’s important to work with team leads and schedule the training sessions in such a way that new hires arrive in time to participate.
Look through the applicant tracking system to see when the new hires will be brought on board and schedule the corporate learning and development program to coincide with their onboarding process.
Daily Habitual Learning
It’s not always convenient to schedule a learning or development program for a large number of employees.
Different departments have completely different quarterly schedules, so if one team has a less busy week, it doesn’t mean other teams will.
If these conflicts are the case throughout the entire quarter in your company, it is best to introduce smaller daily learning sessions that don’t impede productivity as opposed to week-long programs.
Plan and moderate these daily meetings to last somewhere between 20 to 30 minutes.
Daily doses of these sessions allow for a more flexible corporate learning and development program that does not hinder the employees’ regular workflow.
Understand the Goals of the Program
Scheduling employee development strategies largely depends on what goals these training sessions need to achieve. Are the employees learning new skills or developing ones they already know.
For example, if a customer success team needs to be taught new techniques on how to service clients, look through the educational material they will study and train with and see how long it will take them to complete the program.
To determine how long the training program will take, look into the amount of learning material it requires, how long it takes to study it, and how much time it would take to implement these new techniques into the employees’ workflow.
Starting Early
Ideally, a company should assist the professional growth and development of its employees from the day they are brought on board.
Typically, the people and culture specialists, or HR, work closely with the new hires during the onboarding process or establish an onboarding buddy program, thereby onboarding them and promoting interpersonal communication.
Really hammer home the fact that employees have excellent options for online courses, corporate training sessions, and other corporate training activities.
Take this process a step further and introduce new hires to training beyond the standard onboarding process to cultivate an early professional growth and development mindset, one that will serve them for a long time both within your company and in their future employment.
Flexible Learning Programs
In cases where it’s impossible to schedule corporate learning and development programs for a team, department, or entire company, the next best option is flexible learning.
Sometimes, the best way to schedule a training session is by allowing employees to schedule it themselves.
There is no shortage of digital professional development tools that employees can use on their smartphones be it during or outside working hours.
Online lectures and virtual training, ebooks, manuals, and professional training apps are readily available for companies that favor digitized training.
You can even offer an additional benefit to employees by encouraging them to use coworking space software to schedule their weekly lessons and cover their costs.
This flexibility allows employees to dictate their own training hours and prevents their professional development from getting in the way of their workplace responsibilities.
Relevant Scheduling
Putting extra care into scheduling training sessions to coincide with current relevant work tasks can go a long way to increase the efficiency of employee professional development.
In practice, this approach means employees learn new techniques or hone their skills while applying them in their workplace tasks.
A good corporate learning and development schedule can make good use of paralleling training with real-world application of professional development.
For example, say a software development team is taking on a project that requires the employees to learn a new programming language.
Scheduling their training to coincide with this project means that employees will study the language during their training sessions and then put what they learned into practice by working on the project.
The advantage of this approach is that even after the training sessions, employees continue to hone their skills throughout their daily tasks.
To Conclude on Scheduling Corporate Training
These techniques should help you plan and organize corporate learning and development programs with a schedule that will see to your employees’ career growth and motivate them to explore new skills and knowledge within their profession.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ciara Byrnes spends most of her time reporting on digital marketing for an over-stressed audience of marketers and business owners trying to keep up with the fast pace of change. To center herself, she has become a wellness enthusiast, reaching "highs" like morning yoga on the porch of her family's summer lake cabin to "lows" like failing to convince herself that wheatgrass is actually yummy.