There’s no doubt that human capital is the most valuable asset for any business. If you want your company to thrive, you’ll need to ensure that your staff develops constantly and has all the necessary competencies for success. And it is training specialists who will help you with that by being responsible for your team’s development.

In this article, you’ll learn why having a training specialist is important, where to find one, what functions they perform, and how to help them work to the benefit of your company.

Why Сonduct Сorporate Training?

Let’s start with the most common reasons your business needs training.

• Larger talent pool. Candidates who match a job description perfectly and are entirely ready to perform at their best right away are a rare find. If you have a well-established corporate training program, it will make recruitment easier. You can choose prospective hires from a larger number of candidates and grow them professionally. 
• Higher retention. It’s important for employees to see that they do have a future in your company. Training initiatives stimulate the development of skills and competence, and let your employees see that you care about them. This makes them more loyal to the company – 94% of employees are prepared to stay in a company longer if their employers provide training and development for them. 
• Higher productivity. The lower the churn, the higher your employees’ motivation, enthusiasm, and overall productivity are. Employees will strive to practice new knowledge at work and perform better. 

Regardless of the size of your company, if you want to roll out a consistent training program, you’re going to need a staff member who will be responsible for training planning and implementation. 

Why Hire a Training Specialist?

Although HR managers can combine roles in some cases, training activities themselves are time-consuming and can’t be just a side project of the HR department. Moreover, training specialists mostly deal with online learning nowadays and often double as instructional designers. So, it’s better to create a designated position for a training professional and take training and development matters seriously.   

Whether offline or online, launching a training program has specific stages, and it is a training specialist who helps you do the following:

1. Need assessment. A training specialist examines existing training needs and identifies probable opportunities. They ask team leaders and employees to find skill gaps, desired outcomes, and training expectations. 
2. Preparation. This specialist researches industry trends and starts elaborating training programs accordingly. They assess the need for external training providers and get validation for them from the management. If a company wants to run training internally, without outsourcing, training specialists are responsible for developing a team of instructors, trainers, or methodists inside the organization. 
3. Implementation. A training specialist manages the calendar of training events and their budget, makes sure that training is systematized and employees can access it, deals with emerging issues, and facilitates training.
4. Evaluation and analysis. The specialist needs to track employee training and evaluate training processes across the company. To do so, they assess the level of participation and course completion, collect feedback from learners and stakeholders, and prepare a summary of training results.    
5. Execution of on-demand training requests. As your company’s departments become more aware of the importance of training and request training sessions/courses tailored to their specific tasks, a training specialist will work in response to these requests and execute them. 

Training specialists can work with various categories of workers, but some specialize in particular areas. For example, they can facilitate training for frontline employees to ensure that they perform daily operations and work with customers according to the company’s procedures. Or, they can help onboard new or recently promoted managerial staff to their positions by offering them courses on communication and problem-solving skills.

Also, they can conduct mandatory compliance training, like an anti-harassment program, and launch reskilling programs for particular groups of employees. 

Searching for Your Training Specialist: Freelance or Full-time? 

You can see that the scope of a training specialist’s work is fairly wide and requires a deep knowledge of your organizational culture and policies. And you can choose between two options: invite an external training professional or look for a suitable candidate within your organization. Let’s go over the pros and cons of each alternative below. 

Outsourced/freelance employees

External training providers are well-versed in trends and have years of experience in corporate training or impressive instructional design portfolios. They are proficient with SCORM authoring tools, allowing them to create online courses and learning management systems (LMSs) to manage entire training programs. If you plan to learn from an expert and then be able to streamline your training in-house, inviting such a specialist is a good option. 

However, to come up with the best possible training solution, an outsourced professional needs time to get to know your organization and industry, and fees for their work can be significantly higher. 

Full-time in-house specialists

Look for prospective training specialists in your HR department: those employees are already familiar with your business culture, structure, policies, and the peculiarities of the work. It’s easier for them to gain an industry-based perspective and reconcile training programs with your company’s strategy. 

On the other hand, you’ll need to purchase authoring software so your new training specialist can use it to build courses and quizzes in-house, and they will need to learn instructional design theory. Plus, some authoring tools can be rather difficult to master. 

How to Choose the Right Software for Training Specialists 

On the bright side, there are user-friendly options on the market that will enable you to spend less time and money on training in the long run. 

For example, even users with no instructional design experience can build various types of professional-looking training modules with the iSpring Suite authoring toolkit. This will help you speed up training content production exponentially.

iSpring Suite is PowerPoint-based, so building courses with this authoring tool is similar to creating PPT presentations. Your training specialist can make a course like this with images, videos, 14 types of interactive quizzes, dialogue simulations, and more within a few hours – not weeks. 

To train employees more effectively without spending hours on arrangements, you’ll need an LMS. A learning management system is a single online platform where you store courses, enrol learners, and track their progress. If your training specialist doesn’t have experience using LMSs, choose the one that will be convenient and accessible for anyone. iSpring Learn is precisely the LMS that’s easy to manage.

With iSpring Learn, your training specialist will be able to assign courses and materials, track real-time results, gain meaningful reports, and collect employee feedback smoothly and automatically. 

iSpring Learn has an intuitive interface, so employees can find and take courses with no fuss, on any type of device. All of this helps launch training in just one day and streamline it across the company without external help.  

To Wrap Up

Opening a training specialist position in your company is the first step toward an effective training program. With a thoughtful approach and the proper software, training won’t be an extra expense but will make your employees more productive and loyal.