Employee Training Guides & Freelance Trainer Guides

If you are involved in employee training, whether as an HR manager, corporate trainer, or freelance trainer, you’ll find plenty of ideas and advice in the guides below. We cover topics such as workplace communication, employee well-being, leadership, helping new managers, and planning training workshops.

There are also free activities and templates you can use when putting together your own training sessions. And if you’re looking for ready-made resources, we have editable training course materials that you can use to deliver your own workshops.

If you’re planning training for your employees and aren’t sure where to start, take a look at our Workplace Training Guide. It covers how to plan training sessions, choose suitable training methods, and deal with some of the challenges involved in training employees.

Browse All Employee Training Topics

Explore our practical employee training articles, activities, and guides by subject. Choose a topic below to find advice, exercises, and resources for workplace trainers, HR professionals, and managers.

More Resources for Trainers

Explore additional guides on designing and delivering training, facilitating workshops, developing a training career, and finding free training activities.

Latest Employee Training Articles

Employee Training  Guides and Tips

What Is Employee Training?

Employee training involves providing employees with soft skills training and on-the-job skills training.

Soft skills can include communication, leadership, and interpersonal skills training to aid their everyday interactions with colleagues and clients.

The on-the-job training provides employees with specific skills to perform their job roles.

Computer training, how to drive a forklift, or how to manage a certain type of accounting software are examples of on-the-job training.

Employee training topic areas can also include:

• Compliance training
• Safety training
• New Manager training
• New-hire onboarding
• Customer Service Training

For more guidance on planning and delivering employee training, explore our  Workplace Training Hub.

How Do You Develop Effective Employee Training? 5 Practical Tips

Developing employee training is an art form in that, as a corporate trainer or HR manager who develops the training, you become skilled at understanding what works in terms of how to design truly effective training.

There are different types of employee training programs, but the same design tips are useful, whether you are using employee training templates or designing your own training materials from scratch.

So, if you are new to designing employee training plans or teaching materials, here are some tips:

1. Ensure There Is a Need for the Employee Training You Plan to Design

In every company, there tends to be a skills gap, and identifying this skills gap is where you might want to provide training.

By filling the gaps in knowledge, you can, in essence, help your company or business to be fully skilled and ultimately, more productive and effective.

Skills Gap Example – Is there a clear gap, for example, in customer care and service training? Is the one issue that you have a fantastic product and team, but the number of customer complaints is too high?

After analysis, you might realize that some basic customer service training will likely solve the issue. If you have never provided any customer service training to staff, then it might explain the issue.

2. Getting Feedback on What Employee Training Is Needed

As part of the skill gap analysis discussed above, and also to cross-check the necessity of the employee training you are planning to organize and develop, get as much feedback as you can.

Ask managers, employees, and HR, and gather as much feedback as possible.

The goal is to ensure that the training is really needed and will be effective and realistic in terms of costs.

3. Set Clear Aims and Objectives for the Training

With the employee training course materials we design, we think carefully about the key aims and key objectives of the training.

For a typical half-day or full-day course, you will want to have between 3 and 5 aims and objectives. This is more than enough, and you will want to spend an hour or two on each objective, including training activities, and also have time to cover actionable suggestions (measurable goals) towards the end of the training.

4. Develop the Training Materials

Depending on the type of employee training you are organizing, you will either need to design the training yourself (or have the trainer do it), or you can buy off-the-shelf customizable training materials and simply edit them for your brand or company.

If you need to provide training to managers on decision-making, then you can buy decision-making training course materials that are pre-designed and customize them.

For many soft skills, it can be much more efficient, time- and cost-wise, to buy materials made by educational experts (see our training materials), given the time it takes to design the PowerPoint presentations and training activities and plan the whole session.

For areas such as security training and compliance training, these might require the involvement of an SME (Subject Matter Expert) or some other authority.

If you decide to create and develop the training materials yourself, you can use some of our free icebreaker training activities and free soft-skills training activities. Or some of the other free training resources we have available.

5. Decide on the Training Delivery Method

These days, you have three main options, and these are:

• Online training
• Classroom-based training
• Hybrid training (meaning a combination of online and classroom training at the same time)

You also have the choice as to whether or not to deliver the training in real time or to make the training available to be done at any time, i.e., asynchronously. In other words, with asynchronously delivered training, the trainee can log in online and do the training whenever they want.

With in-person real-time training, you have the chance to develop a better rapport and to get the chance to drive home some of the key points by expressing them in real time.

Online training, though, can oftentimes be equally effective and has the benefit of being more inclusive in that employees worldwide or those with mobility issues can be included and offered training.

How Do You Create an Employee Training Guide or Manual?

One thing we are often asked about is how to create employee training guides or manuals from scratch.

a) Designing an employee training manual based on specific training

How you design your employee training manual really depends on how you intend to deliver training to employees (including managers).

For the training course materials that we design, the participant’s (employee’s) handbook is designed so that it exactly matches and relates to the PowerPoint slides that are used in the training session.

The training guides include:

• Screenshots of all training slides
• Activity instructions with space included to write down notes and work on any activities that need the person to write down ideas/thoughts
• Guides on each slide and any necessary information
• Further reading information

So the way we design the participant’s workbook (employee handbook) is done specifically for a particular training that is being provided, whether on emotional intelligence, inclusive leadership, or a topic such as time management.

b) Making the Employee Training Manual the Main Form of Training

There will, though, be many situations where you are designing the employee training manual to be the main way that employees learn.

This can be extremely useful for very technical jobs, whereby you can lay out very specific techniques, such as for computer programming, or where a lot of very specific steps must be followed.

If designing this type of training manual that is not specific to a workshop or training session you are running, then:

1. Decide on the exact aims and objectives of the training – and ensure you detail these at the front of the manual.

2. Aim to tackle each aim and objective in a natural sequence – so structure the training manual to work through one objective at a time. Then summarize that objective and move on to the next one. You will normally have 3 to 5 objectives, so each might be a chapter in the manual.

3. Before proceeding with the training manual, think very carefully about who your audience or audiences in the future will be for this manual. You will want to ensure that you write the manual in a way that is easy to understand for the specific audience it is for.

4. Try to include graphics where possible to make the learning fun. Tools such as Canva.com make designing graphics very easy.

5. While it might not be the most exciting job in the world, make sure to proofread the manual a couple of times and have someone else also check it.

6. After publishing and distributing the training manual, make sure to check every so often if it needs updating and update it!

There are a number of reasons why this is needed, including the fact that facts might now be out of date, knowledge has expanded through new ways of thinking or because of new research findings, or the audience you are writing for might have changed.

If you have any questions about designing employee training guides, get in touch!