Most Common Employee Training Issues

Employee training issues are one of the reasons that the mention of training gets an audible groan out of most people in leadership who have had the task thrust upon them. People are a difficult creature to train and to work with, and since people are so unique to their own experiences, it makes it a bit hard to give overarching advice that helps everyone work through these issues. Thankfully, we are still all the same species, so after a point, there are some standard employee training issues that people typically encounter, and a set of basic responses, most times, will work to resolve them. These are very basic issues, with obvious and basic solutions, but that does not make them any less feasible or true. The first issue that is often a problem in training is the active revulsion employees have to the idea of it. They expect it to be boring, intrusive on at least some of their personal time, and just an overall tedious experience. In worst case scenarios, they may also fear for their career should they fail. After college, most working adults are glad this learning pressure is mostly behind them, so to have it come back to haunt them is a problem. Another issue is a self-centered attitude among employees during training. In training, everyone must depend on everyone else, and a sense of community above self must be achieved. This means that petty rivalries or issues between individuals must be set aside for the grander needs of the group when it comes to training. So, a self-centric view of accomplishments is a destructive mindset to have when going into training like this. Another issue is that people tend to become set in their ways if they are older, or have been doing their job with a company for a while. Any training that they perceive as accusing them of not knowing how to do their job can induce a less than cooperative response from them, but beyond that, they can also be very rejecting of new ideas that change how they do a job they have down to reflex. Finally, one of the other common issues is how training is handled. People don’t want to sit through lectures and then tests in a classroom environment. Casual gatherings with food and discussion work far better, while working alongside hands on learning through training virtualization software where applicable. One last thing, of special mention, is that intrusion into personal time which makes employees want to reject the whole thing from the start. Requiring them to come in on weekends, travel to seminars or spend their break time in training is an excellent idea – if you want to demotivate and disgruntle your employees irreparably. So, employee training issues are often unique to the people, training and company in question, but there do exist some common issues that are part of human nature. These issues are easily fixed by just analyzing what the problem is, and not making the mistakes that lead to them. The more unique, impossible to predict problems must he handled with some understanding of human nature, and a good bit of intuition. Visit our employee training plan template page for further information.