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5 Essential Employee Training Programs

The best way to accomplish business goals and stay competitive with other companies is to foster a culture of continual learning and offer essential enterprise training solutions at your organization. And the benefits of employee training don’t stop there. According to the Association for Talent Development (ATD) companies with comprehensive training programs have 218% more income than companies without formalized training. 

While hyper-specific training courses aimed at individual career paths are critically important, broader training courses for business needs can be offered to anyone at the company.

These five employee training programs are essential for all workers at an organization, regardless of job title.

1. Unconscious Bias

For everyone to be successful at work — and in turn, your organization to be successful  overall — everyone needs to be  on an even playing field.

Unfortunately, that is not realistically how the world works. People hold unconscious biases that play into how they make decisions. These biases affect their decision-making, which trickles down to influence other people at all levels of your company.

The most challenging part of unconscious biases is that they’re unconscious. In other words, people don’t realize they have them. To form truly great leaders that can treat all people fairly, it’s key to make unconscious bias training part of your employee learning.

2. Leadership Development

Even with an amazing product and groundbreaking idea, a business can only go so far as its leaders can take it. Leadership is a skill that is learned and requires immense amounts of humility, excellent listening skills, and a powerful ability to communicate. . 

It takes time to hone these leadership skills, which is why it’s important to identify potential leaders early on and begin teaching them leadership early. With lots of practice and understanding, the future leaders you invest in as a company will pay off tenfold.

3. Communication Skills

The ability to clearly communicate is one of the most important skills there is, especially when it comes to teamwork. Miscommunication, at best, leads to wasted time and resources. At worst, it leads to broken trust and losing people who were great assets to your business.

By learning to communicate with others, employees can listen to others while also feeling heard. Workers can learn to communicate with upper management, and vice versa. While  sometimes requiring more work, open communication is always worth the extra effort.

4. Data for Business

As companies prioritize digital transformation, data analysis becomes a bigger priority. Workers at all levels and titles should gather and analyze data before making decisions, especially if their work impacts the customer’s experience. 

A data for business course can help workers of any type understand the process of collecting data in a way that protects personal information, sorting through that data, and pulling useful business conclusions from it. Learning this cycle will eventually introduce a method of gathering feedback that puts your customer’s wants and needs as a top priority.

5. Cybersecurity

With breaches in tech security becoming more and more common, it’s no longer just the work of cybersecurity professionals to keep data safe. Anyone who has access to your company’s data, customer info, or network must be trained in the basics of cybersecurity. Hackers know how to leverage unsuspecting employees into accidentally giving them backdoor access to critical systems.

The best way to mitigate this risk is to ensure every single employee is trained on how to look out for cyber attacks and stop them before they can infiltrate your systems. 

Train Your Workforce Today

Introducing these five essential employee training programs to your business is key to finding success. Your employees will become more well-rounded individuals and feel valued because of your investment in them. Check out Udacity for Enterprise today to get started.

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Jennifer Shalamanov
Jennifer Shalamanov
Jennifer is a content writer at Udacity with over 10 years of content creation and marketing communications experience in the tech, e-commerce and online learning spaces. When she’s not working to inform, engage and inspire readers, she’s probably drinking too many lattes and scouring fashion blogs.