Employee Training Program Checklists and Tips

Not sure how to build a scalable training program for your company? Here’s our curated list of elements you need to include in your foundational documentation, plus several tips that will make your training programs more effective.

With our checklist, you can create great employee development plans based on effective training needs analysis, prove your training ROI, and ship training programs your teams will love. It’s all here in our step-by-step guide.

Employee Training Policy Checklist

Training policies outline how training at your company should be organized, conceptualized, and delivered to your employees. They describe how your company approaches and plans its training programs and should include the scope and objective of your programs, responsibilities, expectations of learners, and guidelines for participation.

In order to achieve success with your training and development programs, it’s important to document your goals and priorities. The length of your policy will depend on the size and structure of your company, and it should include the following elements:

Introduction

Include a short description of your training and development policy and its purpose, as well as a description of the principles on which it is based.

Your objective or scope

Explain your organization’s goals and objectives over a specified period of time, along with how those goals will be met through training and development. Tie these goals to your company’s overall strategy.

Responsibilities

Communicate the roles involved and the expectations. Include duties for program organizers, course creators, and learners.

Definitions

Define any specific terminology used in your training or materials to make your policy easier to understand.

Budget

Determine your budget allocation and how often it’s set (usually monthly, quarterly, or annually).

Types of employee training available

Describe each type of training you offer, including its scope and employee accessibility.

Trainer roles and responsibilities

Identify each party involved in satisfying training and development requirements, including the L&D team, managers, and any third-party trainers.

Guidelines for participation

Include the steps you’ll take to create new courses or programs and detail your employee participation guidelines.

Assessment and evaluation

Determine how employees will be assessed during and after they complete a course or program.

Training Needs Analysis Tips

A training needs analysis is the best method for identifying what your employees need and want to learn. The key to providing valuable training for employees is to identify their most pressing training needs, then provide courses, workshops, and other learning materials to meet those needs.

When analyzing training needs, we recommend taking a collaborative approach by asking your employees what kind of training they’re looking for based on their experiences and knowledge gaps. Here are some tips for conducting a training needs assessment for your employees:

Ask employees for their input when creating courses

Allow your workers to declare their Learning Needs at any time. A Collaborative Learning platform can centralize the process of collecting information from your employees.

Turn your L&D team into facilitators

Your employees should play an active role in creating new training content. One way to do this is to empower your subject-matter experts by giving them the ability to create and manage learning content on topics in their domain of expertise.

Prioritize training needs by business impact

The training needs with the highest impact should be developed first.

Choose a Collaborative Learning platform that handles training needs analysis

A learning platform that combines collaborative tools with the power of an LMS helps you determine the scope of your needs and lets employees vote on training needs.

Perform a skills gap analysis

After you’ve created your list of training needs, do a skills gap analysis to help you prioritize needs and decide which courses to develop first.

Employee Development Plan Checklist

Development plans lay out a path for employees to optimize their skills and advance within a company. Provide a template for managers to collaboratively fill out with each of their team members. That way, every employee has a personalized and adaptable plan to develop the skills they need to achieve their unique advancement goals.

Gathering the following information will help you build your employee development plans:

Short-term professional goals

Determine where the employee wants to be within your company a year from now.

Mid-term professional goals

Determine where the employee wants to be within your company 3-5 years from now.

Long-term professional goals

Determine where the employee wants to be in 10 years, even if outside your company.

Strengths and talents

Identify the tasks the employee is most capable and confident doing.

Motivators

Figure out the tasks and projects that energize rather than drain them.

An action plan

Detail the specific steps and activities the employee will need to take to meet these goals.

• Specific courses needed
• Target completion date
• Actual completion date

Check-in dates

Set times when you’ll check in with the employee to evaluate progress toward their goals.

Training Tracking Sheet Checklist

Once your employees have their learning objectives and a training or development plan, it’s important to track their progress. Tracking employee training lets you assess its effectiveness and gives you clues on how you can iterate to help your teams achieve their goals.

Include the following information when creating a tracking training sheet:

• Employee name
• Job Title
• Employee department
• Training subject and course
• Date training completed
• Type of training (online, in-person, instructor-led, Hybrid, etc.)
• Instructor or trainer name
• Notes or comments section

*Note: Manually tracking your employees’ training progress is becoming obsolete. These days, it’s more efficient to invest in a learning platform that tracks employee progress and performance automatically.

Tips for Tracking Your Training ROI

Calculating your return on investment (ROI) can be a useful way of assessing your training program’s effectiveness and value. It’s also vital for securing more budget and support for your programs.

Measuring ROI can be challenging. Here are some tips to help:

Set measurable and specific goals

Make sure you know what success looks like before you start building your program. As an example, one of your goals could be to complete a needs analysis for every department by the end of the fiscal year.

Tie your goals into your company’s objectives

Your goals should tie into your company’s initiatives. For example, your training can be linked to a company goal of increasing revenue by a certain percentage over a set period of time.

Measure your baselines and perform post-training assessments

Before you start training, take initial measurements like pre-course assessments so you can measure changes over time. When training is complete, conduct a post-course assessment to compare scores.

Follow your course completion rates

Keep an eye on your completion rates to make sure employees are completing their training.

Use integrations when possible

Many online learning platforms can connect with your existing software and communication tools to help you measure your training’s impact.

Use a calculator

Enlist the help of a training ROI calculator to more accurately track your metrics.

Use the Kirkpatrick Model of training evaluation

The Kirkpatrick Model is a common training evaluation method that can be used to assess your ROI by connecting quantitative metrics directly to learning outcomes.