Tips for making your staff training online course stand out

When creating skills development courses for your staff, partners, or customers, it’s not always easy to know whether the course you’ve built will engage your audience.

You want it to be interesting. Memorable. You want learners to leave your course with actionable advice they can use in their job roles.

There’s no secret recipe for creating 5-star staff training content, but if you follow the advice below, you’ll see increased engagement from your learners and improved knowledge retention.

The real trick is finding a learning management system that can help you track and report on your engagement and retention metrics. (Hint: it’s LearnRight!)

Here’s what we recommend:

Keep training courses relevant

The number one reason your employees, partners, or customers will listen closely to your online course is that they find it intensely and uniquely relevant to them.

Training that’s relevant to your audience

You can achieve this by making the content hyper-relevant, narrowing the content’s scope so that it is finely tuned to specific groups of people.

For instance, instead of a one-size-fits-all customer training, develop different training courses for customers in each industry that include examples and use cases that are particular to that industry.

Training that’s relevant to your goals

Before you start sketching an outline for your training course, write down the goals you have for the course. 

Those goals should guide every piece of content you develop for your training course. If you can’t link a section of your content to a goal, it doesn’t have a place in your course.

It sounds silly, but if you remain true to your goals when creating staff training content, your audience will know it. They’ll find it easier to stay focused on the material and won’t be tempted to disengage from the lessons.

Training that’s relevant to roles and responsibilities

Your audience needs to understand how they can apply the lessons you’ve created in their job role today. Like, immediately.

If the staff training you develop feels esoteric or unrelated to their everyday job realities, your employees will not engage with it.

And rightly so. They have jobs to do, and they want to do them well. They expect that staff training will allow them to meet their responsibilities better and more efficiently, so you have an obligation to create training course content that delivers.

Show them real examples of how they can apply the training and advice they receive in their job roles and the expected outcomes.

The ultimate benefit of staff training is empowerment; when you empower your staff with relevant training, you empower them to do their jobs well.

Keep training and development engrossing

You can keep your training and development engrossing for learners with good writing, catchy headings and subheadings, and a tightly-focused outline.

Focus training courses with a tight outline

You’ve identified specific goals for your training course. Next, use them to create an outline focused on those goals.

Your outline should move learners through the course material at a good pace – steady, but not so fast that it leaves anyone behind. It should be signposted with eye-catching headings and subheads (see below), and it should conclude with learners having arrived at their destination – the main goal of the training.

Grab attention with a thought-provoking headline

Headlines and subheads give your course structure, so learners understand the path they will take through your training course.

Your training course headline has the potential to pique the interest of your learners out of the gate. It sets a tone for the entire training and tells your audience what they will have learned by completing the course.

You can continue drawing your learners deeper into your course content with equally enthralling subheadings. 

Address real problems with real solutions

Staff training that doesn’t offer specifics is, frankly, a waste of company time.

Training is a real opportunity to address the questions and concerns of your employees, partners, or customers. You can offer them actionable advice to solve their pain points, establishing your company as a trusted authority on managing these problems.

If you need inspiration for which questions need to be answered in your training course, look at your customer reviews and testimonials. These often hold gems of information about what your customers value or find problematic about your service or what pain points cause your staff to struggle.

When you find the problems, call them out and address them. When your training contains quality content, it will naturally be engrossing for your audience.

Keep training convenient

The beauty of choosing a learning management system (LMS) for your training courses is that your learners can take the course when and where it suits them.

When training is convenient, your partners, staff, and customers are more likely to complete it. That means less follow-up time from HR chasing down learners to ensure they’ve finished their training.

Using an LMS to allow for online courses also shows that you trust your team to complete their training and acknowledge that training requires valuable time from them. Companies that offer trust and value to their team enjoy harder-working staff, more loyal customers, and partnerships that flourish.

Track your training results

As a company, you’ll want to know that your training courses have resonated with the right audience and contributed to positive results. If your course isn’t performing as you’d hoped, you can use engagement metrics to pinpoint where your audience became disengaged.

Measuring and reporting training success is more straightforward with an LMS tool that prioritises progress and results tracking. The right LMS will offer detailed reports on learners at the group and individual levels. Reports will be simple to construct and easy to download.

At LearnRight, we believe online learning should culminate in measurable learning outcomes. That’s why our LMS features advanced progress and results tracking on every learner and group.

Take a tour of LearnRight to explore how we support training courses that engage your learners and track learning outcomes.