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A customer service leader recently emailed me for some training advice.

Their onboarding program for new hires included three days of product training. The leader felt new hires were not engaged during the training and frequently failed to retain much of the content. 

He was hoping for a way to get people more excited about three days of product training, but that's not the advice I gave him. Three days of boring, irrelevant content was the problem.

So what should he do?

I interviewed JD Dillon, Chief Learning Officer at Axonify, a company that provides a platform to enable effective microlearning. Dillon gave some excellent suggestions, and I've added a few of my own.

The Interview

You can watch the video of the full 22-minute interview or scroll down to read the highlights.

Ways to Improve New Hire Training

Dillon and I tackled a number of issues in our conversation. Here are some of the top challenges that we discussed.

Why do companies fail to properly train new hires?

Dillon points out that many leaders feel pressed for time. 

They don't think they can spare the necessary moments to create a learning plan, spend time with new hires, evaluate their progress, and provide constructive feedback.

The alternative is a disaster.

Without proper training, employees make more mistakes, are slower to reach peak performance, and are more likely to quit. All of this takes far more of the manager's time than training people right in the first place.

What is the difference between onboarding and new hire training?

Both are important, but there's an essential difference.

Onboarding starts the day an employee is hired, and becomes an ongoing process. For practical purposes, I mark the end of onboarding as the point where an employee is fully trained to do their job. 

There's a lot of stuff that's included in onboarding:

• New hire paperwork

• Compliance stuff

• Tours and orientations

• Getting new hires set up with work tools

• Giving people access to buildings, networks, etc.

Training is also a part of onboarding, where new hires learn the specific knowledge and skills necessary to do their jobs. 

You can learn more from my LinkedIn Learning course, Running Company Onboarding.

What are some common flaws with new hire programs?

There are a number of common challenges that are easily fixed.

The first is creating clear learning objectives. Many new hire programs are content-focused, and the desired results are ill-defined. Once you identify exactly what a fully trained person should be able to do, you can work backwards to create more effective training. 

You can use this worksheet to create your learning objectives.

Another challenge is access to information. Dumping three days worth of product knowledge on a hapless group of new employees is a recipe for disaster. People quickly forget information they don't immediately use.

Dillon suggests finding easy ways to give employees just-in-time access to the information they need. At the 13:25 mark in our interview, he shares an example of a grocery store using the computerized scale in the deli to give employees quick access to how-to information.

A third flaw is a lack of assessment. You need a way to determine whether or not someone is trained.

How can you assess whether someone is trained?

The answer to this question relies on having clear learning objectives (see above). 

Once you clearly define what a fully trained employee should be able to do, you can assess whether they've been trained by observing them doing their jobs.

For example, when I've created new hire training programs for contact center agents, new agents were considered fully trained once they could meet basic quality standards while handling live contacts.

More Training Resources

I've gathered a list of resources that can make it easy for you to create effective new hire training programs.

Start by checking out Dillon's personal website, which has a lot of great insight on improving workplace learning.

If I could buy just one book on how to train, it would be Tellling Ain't Training by Harold D. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps. It provides clear and comprehensive information for building simple, yet highly effective training lessons.

Finally, my How to Design and Deliver Training Programs course on LinkedIn Learning can guide you step-by-step through quickly creating an effective training program.