Organizations conduct training on a variety of topics, but employee onboarding training is one of the most critical to ensure employee engagement and retention. 

Make Training Reinforcement Part of the Onboarding Process

Your new hires have just completed onboarding, but they’ve already started forgetting the training. To make your onboarding process more effective, you’ll want to make sure you have a follow-up plan in place. 

Define Clear Training Goals and Reinforcement Objectives

Before you begin your training reinforcement program, you’ll want to make sure that the organization fully understands the reinforcement goals.

There are a few best practices that every onboarding reinforcement program should follow:

• Make sure managers fully understand the reinforcement program
• Managers should foster a supportive learning environment
• Managers should encourage application and be open to feedback
• Your reinforcement program should align with your current training goals to produce the desired behavior change
• Use training reinforcement analytics to find knowledge gaps and help the new hire progress through onboarding

Use Reinforcement Data to Your Advantage

During a reinforcement program, you’ll constantly be gathering information about your new hires' progress. Reinforcement helps guide new hires through the onboarding process, giving them the ability to fully understand their training. Your program is also an effective tool for assessing training impact and proving behavior change over time.

At Mindmarker, we coach our clients to constantly create Actionable Intelligence about what’s happening during reinforcement and why. This data can be used to improve future onboarding training programs.

Evaluate the Impact of Onboarding Training

Training new hires takes time, patience, and an impactful onboarding process. How do you know your new hires are getting the most out of your program?

A well-crafted training reinforcement program will allow you to constantly monitor your learners' progress, assess training effectiveness over time, prove impact, and determine ways to improve onboarding.

Learn more about defining your training goals, determining reinforcement objectives, closing the five reinforcement gaps, and achieving the three phases of behavior change in our step-by-step guide. Download the 10-Step Guide to Determine Your Reinforcement Objectives. 

This post was originally published on February 3, 2017.