In today’s age, massive digitization and disruptive technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) have penetrated nearly every aspect of human lives.
With the ever-changing macroeconomic conditions that rapidly alter how corporates make their strategic moves, it is no surprise that companies are actively re-evaluating their current training systems. In fact, they are pre-emptively investing in more effective training methods and corporate trainers to achieve workforce development.
Unprecedented access to content, coupled with effective and efficient methods of delivery are bringing in a paradigm shift in learning. The ever-evolving workforce that thrives on digital learning, it evident that corporate training is transforming at breakneck speeds.
Table of Contents
What is Corporate Training?
Corporate training is a function of human resource management that aims to provide the organization’s employees with the knowledge and skills required to be successful. In turn, the growth of employees also contributes to the success of the business.
Why is Corporate Training needed?
Technology is a boon to the corporate training segment as it has made the process of business transformation much more well-received and better paced in this constantly changing business environment. While the traditional methods and basic learning objectives of corporate training have noticeably changed, the way in which the training content is delivered has transformed by leaps and bounds and is still undergoing a continuous evolutionary cycle.
A research carried out by McKinsey reveals that about 2/3rd of total business transformation mandates fail as they inadequately meet the objectives set and are not supported by a ‘skilled-enough’ work-force. Hence, the reorganization of the work-force becomes an inevitable task.
In recent years, training and development have become a separate business function with more formal and distinct methodologies and theories. Its also seen as a long-term strategic assignment rather than a cost center for the organization. The majority of companies have embraced ‘continual learning’ and are consciously investing more in it to promote employee growth both professionally and personally and acquire a highly skilled workforce as a result.
With influence and increased budgets, the Learning & Development professionals now have executive buy-in to expand their focus from trying to solve daily challenges to closing skills gaps to remain competitive. Read more about the digitization of corporate training here.
How has Corporate Training changed?
The increasing complexity of businesses, the short shelf-life of skills amidst digital transformation as well as the changing nature of the workforce have made companies shift from traditional training methods to blended learning models for more effective learning.
One cannot deny that millennials form the majority of the workforce today, and they will be the ones leading organizations in the future. Also, thanks to interconnectivity provided by new technologies, the persona of typical learners have transformed with time (as below):
Not only has the persona of a typical learner undergone a drastic transformation, but the nature of learning itself has widened in scope. Watch out for some corporate learning trends and facts dominating the industry in 2019-2020 (as below):
What does Blended Learning mean?
What began as a traditional way of training i.e. Instructor-led training (ILT) in classrooms, is now being blended with mobile/web-based learning platforms to keep eLearning continuous and relevant in nature and make the same very personalized. No wonder eLearning is set to become a $325 billion industry by 2025, globally. Further, companies with dynamic career models for their employees outperform their competition by providing continuous learning opportunities and a deeply embedded culture of development.
As the name suggests, Blended Learning is a combination of one or more traditional classroom methods with e-learning/online learning methods. It is also known as Integrated Learning or Technology-enabled Blended Learning (TeBL®). The elements of blended learning make the entire training process for employees much more engaging, convenient, and practical enough to be applied right away in their respective workplaces. The Boeing Company, Ernst & Young, and Intel Corporation are probably the first to adopt blended learning techniques into their training programs. Here’s how they successfully incorporated and benefitted from it.
What are the benefits of Corporate Training for employees?
Most of us tend to use the terms ‘Training’ & ‘Development’ interchangeably, but are they the same?
While training programs help employees to learn specific and quantifiable skills, like performing certain procedures with great precision or understanding a specific process; development programs focus on broader skills that apply to a wider context or set of situations like goal-setting, decision-making, communication, or leadership skills.
Corporate training serves the dual purpose of furthering an individual’s growth as well as the organization’s growth. In other words, organizational effectiveness is a function of the employee’s growth.
Here are the benefits Corporate Training provides to employees
- It creates constant awareness in the minds of all the employees of the vision and mission of the organization and its strategic goals.
- It identifies the training needs of the workforce in the industry, keeping into consideration the corporate plans and the need for specific departments.
- It encourages employees to develop a sense of belonging and commitment to the organization, and instill within them proper work ethics to handle the job at hand.
- It imparts the role-specific knowledge and skills necessary for performing the job effectively and efficiently.
- It keeps the employees abreast of all the necessary conceptual, technical, human, and managerial skills in the areas of problem-solving and decision-making.
- It includes activities that aid the employees in their growth, succession planning, and career planning.
- It helps achieve the effectiveness of training by tapping the in-house training facilities as well as external training sources externally in a balanced manner to develop faculty support in all disciplines and at all levels.
- It allows employees to familiarize themselves and socialize into their profession via formal and informal processes that shape the way that they see themselves in and how their employers, customers, and peers see them.
To prepare and secure themselves for the digital future that lies ahead, the employees today must have access to training of all types to keep up with the latest trends and associated skills. If they don’t actively keep pace with the changes in the business environment, they will lose ground in their roles and eventually lose the competency race as well.
Only those companies that adapt business practices and processes, readily accept change, and prepare their employees to sail through the complexities of the market will be able to achieve sustainable success in the long run. Talent developers are also increasingly looking to support the business in strategic workforce planning by focusing on attracting and retaining talent – Employee Retention.
Types of Corporate Training for employees
A LinkedIn research report outlines the most important hard skills (training) and soft skills (development) that companies are emphasizing in their training programs.
Apart from the above hard and soft skills, corporate training programs encompass the following topics as well:
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Leadership Development
Corporate training sessions deal with assessing, developing & enhancing the leadership skills of the employees. The purpose is to make them future-ready to take up senior positions in the organization, and drive change management effectively. This also covers executive coaching & mentoring as a part of their training agenda.
A leadership development program may include passing references to the types of leadership behaviors, understanding each individual’s strengths and leadership qualities, an analysis of the assumptions regarding leadership and their effect on how people see the world, and personal beliefs and patterns, etc.
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Personal Productivity/ Time Management
Personal productivity and time management sessions teach and enable you to manage time effectively so that you can achieve an optimal balance between your professional and personal goals.
For this training to be successful, it should have at least 3 core components:
- Aspects of attention management
- Clear information about the roles and their respective priorities
- A detailed workflow management system
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Customer Service
Customer service is one of the key metrics to determine the success of a business. It offers a direct opportunity to the company to connect with its customers, solve their problems, and show that they care about their needs. If the customer service is well-executed, it will resonate with customers for years to come, and they will inspire word-of-mouth advertising. This is the primary reason why training customer support teams is as important as training the sales & marketing teams.
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Cultural Diversity/Competency
It is important to acknowledge the need for understanding and assimilating cultural differences, so as to enhance client-centered care and improve the delivery of culturally-appropriate services. Diversity Training or Sensitivity Training primarily advocates that cultural differences should be valued, and specific competency training should be designed to build culture-specific awareness, knowledge, and skills through methods such as direct instruction, facilitated group discussions, role-playing and technology/media.
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Emotional Intelligence
Being aware of your emotions helps you to familiarize yourself with your own needs, the needs of others, and can also help you develop better relationships and make better decisions in your professional/personal lives. Training sessions on emotional intelligence (EI) help you work on your emotions and channelize them correctly. The leaders with a strong mixture of self-management, emotional awareness, and social skills are able to navigate relationships more effectively and are also most successful in their professional and personal lives.
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Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is one of the key ways in which you can boost the productivity level of your employees. You can engage your employees by offering them constructive praises caring about their wishes, introducing them to the people who benefit from their work, showing people that they are making progress, their work is valued by the company, and most importantly, they feel purpose in their work.
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Harassment Prevention
It is important to protect your employees and business from harassment claims which are on the rise, because of the increased awareness of relevant laws and associated rights. Harassment prevention training is a vital part of your company’s overall employee education program that helps reduce and prevent claims effectively. These programmes are administered by either in-house specialists or external trainers.
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Stress Management and Compassion Fatigue
Stress management training sessions aim at teaching your employees the ways by which they can recognize and effectively beat stress and compassion fatigue. Compassion Fatigue is defined as an extreme state of tension developed by preoccupying yourself and your thoughts with the suffering of those being helped.
Here is the List of the Best Corporate Training Companies in India
Choosing what’s best for your company can be a strenuous task, especially when it comes to corporate training. There are many factors that companies take into consideration while shortlisting a few corporate training providers such as time, money, availability, qualifications of the trainer, and the key areas of training that the service provider specializes in. After thorough research on some common parameters, the ‘Best Corporate Training Companies in India’ have been listed down as below:
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CENTUM LEARNING
Topping the list is Centum Learning which is a leading organization in the global training landscape and skills development offering technology-enabled blended learning (TeBL®) solutions. Blended learning techniques have proved to be an effective tool to keep the attrition rate in check, thanks to the collaborative learning environment and the trainer feedback system integrated into it. With domain expertise in over 21 industry verticals and a team of over 2000 learning and development specialists, Centum has skilled more than 1.2 million people across India and Africa.
Centum Learning’s unique smart learning platform Centum LearnPro® is just not an LMS but a Learning eXperience Platform (LXP) as it not only simplifies learning but also stimulates development. This smart learning platform provides a single-point-of-access for all the learning needs of the employees (content curation and/or content aggregation), creating learning blueprints and career pathways, tracking learning activities delivered via multiple channels and content partners, and facilitating networking and collaboration.
The corporate training solutions that Centum Learning provides to individuals and corporates can be accessed here.
Centum Learning’s unique solution of ‘Source Hire Train (SHT)’ has also largely contributed to its leading position as one of the ‘Best Corporate Training Companies in India’. This training includes the complete induction training as well as product & process training before the candidate joins the client.
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NIIT LIMITED
NIIT Limited is a global leader in talent development and skills enhancement, and it offers a variety of learning management solutions, cutting across multiple disciplines to institutions and individuals across 30+ countries. Setup in 1981 to help the nascent IT industry to overcome its challenges when dealing with human resources, the company ranks among the world’s leading training companies owing to its comprehensive array of programs in talent development.
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INDUS MANAGEMENT
Indus Management is a corporate training company and consultancy. Established in 1996 in Delhi/NCR, it has a pan-India presence. It has over 400 associated trainers working with them for 20 years, and its experience spans across industries in the private and public sectors. The Founder & CEO is Mr. Mukesh Khetarpal, and the Co-founder & Executive Director is Mr. Amarjit Singh.
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TTi GLOBAL
TTi Global is a full-service support services and training resources company. Established in 1976, it is now driving change and delivering results in over 24 countries. The regional offices were added in Europe in 2008, new territories continued to be explored by the company, and the resultant exploration brought TTi Global’s pioneering spirit to India and the Middle East.
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NOVO CONSULTING
Novo Management Consulting Private Limited is a private consulting firm incorporated in 2013. The consultancy develops an empirical picture and puts together a change programme which is practically implemented over a period of 6-12 months. This program helps drive clear behavioral and measurable financial results.
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MANPOWER GROUP
ManpowerGroup is a leader in innovative workforce solutions that helps nurture human potential and shape it to leverage the power of business. Established in 1948, it has served clients and candidates across 80 countries for over 70 years. Under the leadership of Jonas Prising (Chairman & CEO), ManpowerGroup serves both small and large organizations across all industry sectors through their different brands and offerings.
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RIGHT MANAGEMENT
Established in 1980, Right Management is a global talent strategy and career management expert with 35+ years of experience. Its methods have been time-tested in more than 50 countries and in that time, they have employed around 40000 people, conducted 12 million+ interviews per year. It has also successfully transitioned 3 million+ people into new roles.
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BYLD GROUP OF COMPANIES
BYLD Group of Companies stands for Blanchard, Yoma, Leadership Consulting and DOOR Training. It provides a diverse range of culturally-neutral & research-based organizational effectiveness solutions that are nationally/globally benchmarked. BYLD’s consultants have about 1000+ years of accumulated unique experience, and they have been delivering measurable results for more than 20 years to more than 2000 clients in India.
Conclusion
High-quality business outcomes and service depend upon how well the employees are trained and developed to handle the ever-increasing competition in the VUCA market. Thus, corporate training will always remain a significant function of any organization, though its role is going to be very different from what it was in the past.
As we are slowly shifting towards a knowledge economy, intellectual capital is becoming the main generator of revenue for both the organization and its employees and is playing a key role in retaining employees. A well-designed training program by one of the top training companies in India, with a clearly designed career path can increase job satisfaction among young professionals multifold, and can also help them in becoming effective and efficient at the workplace.