When it comes to internal training content, especially if you create custom content for your business yourself, it’s important to make sure your content is fresh at all times. There’s nothing worse than reading out-of-date books or watching training videos that reference a standard practice that no one uses anymore! Not only will it make your learners tune out, but it will also reflect poorly on your training offerings overall.

What’s the point in training your staff on outdated concepts? It’s just a waste of everyone’s time. Let’s take a look at some straightforward ways for you to ensure that your internal training content is always as fresh as possible.

Update It to Reflect Internal Processes

One huge benefit of creating custom content for your internal training is that the material can accurately reflect your business and your industry. If you use scenarios or refer to specific data, you can use real examples from your organization and industry. This approach ensures that the training you are offering your staff is tailored to them, and the information that they learn during the training session is directly applicable to their day-to-day role.

If your business updates an internal process, you can update your training to reflect this change. For example, if your sales team stops using a certain tool or changes its approach to collecting new business leads, you can update your training to reflect this change. This way, all the information included in your training examples will be up to date and relevant to the way your business works, which wouldn’t be true of off-the-shelf training content.

This approach will also help avoid confusion with any new team members, as any processes or examples mentioned in their onboarding will reflect the way your business works now.

Update It Based on Staff Feedback

A great tool to use to ensure your training content is always as fresh as possible is learner feedback. Regularly soliciting feedback from employees who have completed training is the best way to ensure your training is effective and hits the right points to make sure learners are coming away with the knowledge they need to perform their jobs correctly.

Asking for feedback on a training course as soon as it’s finished should be standard practice and something you incorporate into your internal training process. To make it as easy as possible to manage for your internal training team, it’s a good idea to use a training management platform that includes an automated communications functionality. This way, you will be able to set up a customized online survey to obtain the feedback you need and then set it to send automatically to all the learners who attended a training course. Then, the system will automatically record responses, and you can use its reporting function to analyze the results and see what changes you need to make to your training offering to improve it for the next group of learners.

Not only will continuously reworking your training content based on staff feedback mean you are always offering the best training possible, but it will also demonstrate to your staff that you value their opinions.

Make Changes Based on Company Goals

It’s safe to say that your company is not going to be working toward the same goals every year, or even every quarter. Therefore, it’s vital that your internal training content reflects changing goals. When your management team sits down at the start of the year or the quarter to decide on the goals for the whole company, you should also make sure your content still reflects your company’s broader training goals.

For example, let’s say your company has decided to shift your focus to interacting with customers in person or on the telephone this year instead of using email to ensure a more personalized customer experience. As a result of this change, you may want to change the examples your sales and customer service training references to include face-to-face customer interactions instead of digital ones. You may even need to update entire sections of your training content to make sure they reflect the way your sales and customer service teams are now working.

Plan for Regular Review Sessions

A key part of the training planning process is to ensure that you schedule regular review sessions. Set aside some time for each training course that you offer to go through all the content and make sure it’s still up to date, relevant and useful to team members.

Even if you’re making small changes regularly based on staff feedback, it’s still good practice to plan some time for a deep dive into all your training content to make sure you are always refreshing it where needed. The last thing you want is stale content than bores your staff.

Implementing small changes to your internal training offering should help ensure that your content stays fresh and relevant and also means that staff who have to complete the same training sessions regularly in order to remain qualified in a particular skill won’t be bored. They’ll always be learning the most up-to-date information available.

Making sure you take the time to rework your training content when necessary means your staff are always getting the best training. Soon, refreshing your content will become part of your internal training process.