Align Learning to Business Goals: 7 Benefits of Corporate Training

In business, time is always in demand. Ensuring it’s being invested towards a future where business goals are met is a genuine challenge.

Maintaining focus on immediate goals can be the pressing priority for most employees, across all teams and seniority levels. This results-oriented mindset can understandably make carving out time for training seem like an interruption.

However, corporate training is one of the most future-focused activities that a team can engage in.

It offers an opportunity to reset – creating an opening for change and reinvigorating team members. Corporate training can help ensure employees are up to date in their professional skillsets, not left behind as industries progress and evolve, and are more empowered to contribute to current business goals.

Indeed, the scheduling headaches and deferment of other tasks required for corporate training can be more than offset by the substantive benefits this approach brings. Below, we’ve highlighted some of the institutional benefits of corporate training programs.

1. Target any performance metrics your organization wants to hit

   A corporate training exercise can offer a much-needed window to recalibrate what success looks like in each employee’s performance. From a strategic point of view, this can be an opportunity to implement new performance metrics, and refocus on previously unheeded skills, competencies, and performance aspects. Engaging in a corporate training program is the ideal way to create space and time to demonstrate these metrics to employees, gather input, and craft a system that works for your unique organization.

2. Improve employee retention, advocacy and productivity

   An employee that is better trained is better prepared for the high-performance targets of the enterprise sector. Trusting that an organization has their long-term interest at heart and will invest in training them with new skills and techniques has been demonstrated to be a key employee concern. Delivering this will ensure both retention and performance while leading to an upswing in employee advocacy, as employees provide positive feedback that attracts more candidates in the recruitment market.

3. Connect employees to business goals

   When it comes to defining what the ultimate goal of an organization is, the mission statement is a great place to start. However, the routes to this overall goal can be lost in the weeds between an employee’s daily tasks and that final, grand goal of the organization. Effective corporate training can help clear this up by more accurately aligning learning programs with business goals. This can be achieved while putting emphasis on the importance team members play in making these final goals materialize.

4. Increases leadership competency, at all levels in your organization

   Leadership qualities are necessary throughout enterprise-level businesses. Each team, from small departments to the executive level, relies on the initiative and wisdom of those in leadership positions to propel the business forwards. Reinforcing and better defining these aspects among employees ensures better inter-team leadership, and overall competency across the business.

5. Better talent discovery

   Rolling out corporate training programs can reinforce and build on existing skillsets that employees possess, but they are also a bridge to discovering new skills and competencies among a workforce.  Especially high performance in certain training modules may indicate an underlying competency or talent that can be readily utilized in the pursuit of overall business goals. A company with a robust feedback culture that enables ongoing conversations with employees is far more likely to discover dormant talent.

6. Helps apply work processes uniformity

   A team or department in an enterprise-level business will be squarely focused on delivering on their own work processes – those crucial sets of tasks that produce output and value for the business. However, some teams may be hanging on to outdated or inefficient ways to administer these tasks. A corporate training program will introduce team leaders to a range of cross-organization best practices, that will reduce team barriers, eliminate wasted resources and time, and better foster cross-organizational understanding of how each department works.

7. Improve workforce communication

   Every organization works better when their key stakeholders feel they can reach out for help and assistance when required. By educating team members to communicate in this regard, including using continuous listening tools like Bluepulse, a far more communicative organization can be achieved – where shortfalls in training can be swiftly overcome through in-step assistance, wherever required.

The overall benefits of enacting corporate training programs can be considerable, but justifying the time and expense of these is only possible through measurement. Revising and refreshing training material is all part of the process.

Platforms like Blue have been custom-made to provide visibility and intelligence in this regard – shining a revealing light on the collective skills, talent, and competency that exists within an organization.

Making that future-focused decision, to ramp up training and trading that off with winding with some other tasks, is vindicated with the galaxy of benefits that platforms like this can reveal.

Connect the dots with Blue and align your training with business goals