How to Incorporate Formalized Training in Your Operational Strategy

There are various ways in which training can be both encouraged and offered in the workplace. While informal training is becoming increasingly popular and does boast various benefits, formalized training remains essential and can increase the training performance of your organization.

Formalized training is the scheduled, documented and repeatable half of that picture: the sessions everyone attends, the content someone owns, and the completion record you can produce on request. The practical question is how to incorporate formalized training into your operational strategy without losing the informal learning that grows around it.

Use Formalized Training in Your Operational Strategy

Education does not come to a halt when you earn a degree or find a job. Further education and development opportunities have become a top priority for current-day employees, and the organizations that treat training as a standing operational commitment rather than an annual event are the ones whose skills stay current.

Two operations managers reviewing a printed employee training plan together at a desk

Formalized Training has Many Benefits

There are many reasons why a good formalized training program should form part of your organization’s overall employee training strategy. Some of the chief benefits include being able to train many employees at once, the availability of accurate and current content, and the opportunity to utilize various training methods that are conducive of favorable adult learning.

Formalized training also serves as an investment into your organization’s future as it boosts the effectiveness of your workforce. A formalized strategy can be implemented with great success when it comes to compliance training that requires all employees to have successfully completed pre-determined specified training.

Regulators treat that completion record as the proof, not the session itself. Under the OSHA personal protective equipment standard, each affected employee shall demonstrate an understanding of the training specified in paragraph (f)(1) of this section, and the ability to use PPE properly, before being allowed to perform work requiring the use of PPE. That is a formalized training requirement written into the rule: schedule it, deliver it, verify it, and keep the record.

Strike a Training Balance

In order for your employee training strategy to be as beneficial as possible to both the organization and its employees, it has to be well-balanced. The easiest way to create and maintain this balance is by incorporating informal training strategies into your formalized strategy. This can be done in various ways such as encouraging employees to pursue further education opportunities in their personal capacity.

Large employers have put real money behind the same idea. Amazon announced it will be spending more than $700m over the next six years in order to retrain more than 100,000 of its US employees, a full third of its workforce. Smaller organizations cannot match that budget, but the underlying move, which is funding skills your people will use next rather than only the ones they use today, scales down.

These training opportunities can include anything from short skill development programs to career-relevant graduate degrees. Despite having a reputation for being an elitist institution, MBA programs, in particular, have become increasingly accessible in recent years. Pursuing such an online qualification can be invaluable to an employee who is driven to reach the top of the corporate ladder.

Facilitator demonstrating a documented work procedure to four employees in a hands-on workshop

Keep Employees Excited About Training

Although the benefits of formalized training can’t be disputed in any way, it does have some drawbacks to be aware of too. Employees don’t always view compulsory training in a positive light, mainly due to unpleasant prior experiences and a perception that the subject matter is not relevant.

In order to ensure that the training is effective, it is therefore important to keep employees engaged. This can be accomplished in a number of ways which include making training a part of your company’s culture, ensuring your training is personalized, and incorporating training into career advancement and bonus opportunities. Excitement can be amplified even more by utilizing innovative training aids such as gamification, simulations, and augmented reality.

Relevance is the lever that costs nothing. When the curriculum is drawn from the procedures people actually run, the training stops feeling like an interruption and starts reading as the instructions for the job.

Formalized Training Supports Your Operational Strategy

Offering effective training opportunities to employees and encouraging them to also seek out opportunities on their own can be extremely beneficial. Even if employees are not eager to participate in formalized training at first, they can soon become fully engaged through a bit of effort.

Incorporate formalized training into your operational strategy the same way you would any other operating system: a written curriculum, a named owner, a schedule, and a completion record. Let informal learning grow on top of that baseline rather than in place of it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is formalized training?

Formalized training is the scheduled, documented and repeatable part of your employee training strategy. Someone owns the content, the sessions are planned rather than improvised, and completion is recorded. Informal training is everything that happens around it: shadowing, questions across a desk, and self-directed study.

How does formalized training support an operational strategy?

It makes capability predictable. When the curriculum is written down and completion is recorded, you know which employees can run which process, you can staff work accordingly, and you can produce proof of competence when a customer or a regulator asks for it.

How do you balance formalized and informal training?

Set the formal baseline first, covering the tasks where inconsistency is expensive or non-negotiable. Then encourage informal learning on top of it, including further education employees pursue in their personal capacity, short skill development programs and career-relevant graduate degrees.

How do you keep employees engaged in compulsory training?

Make training part of the company culture rather than an annual interruption, personalize it to the role, tie it to career advancement and bonus opportunities, and use training aids such as gamification, simulations and augmented reality where they genuinely help.