Size, strength, funding, type of business, or mode of working – all of these are important for every organization. But most importantly, regardless of where your organization sits based on the these parameters, planning your training strategy, in this case your online training strategy, will almost always be the same.

So, let’s quickly take a look at how successful online training strategies are planned, and most importantly, what are the steps that you need to follow!

It’s important to note that some of the most well-planned corporate training strategies have failed. But that does not mean the end of the training journey for such organizations. Instead, they define new ways of appropriately measuring and evaluating their approach and we are going to do the same in order to build and implement a successful online training strategy.

If engagement is what you’re looking for, then that is a goal. It is important for you to determine or at least know what you want. Irrespective of whether you’re making the course yourself or using an external vendor’s services. Without thoroughly defining the goals of training your employees in a specific subject or skill, and the reasons behind doing so, your training program can fail even if the learners learnt everything you taught them. Because, chances are, everything you taught them is only great on paper and holds no actual value in everyday use at the workplace.

A successful online training strategy is one that defines important goals and targets that are critical for employees to achieve in order to ensure the business benefits from training their employees.

Another crucial factor here is knowing what your audience wants. Its common for organizations to restructure their policies governing employees from time to time based on the needs of the employer. Similarly, it is crucial to ask if the training you provide is relevant to what your learners want today. You can seek additional clarity on who your learners are, what do they do, how old they are, their level of literacy, education background, and more. Armed with this info, you can easily build just the right training to ensure a successful online training strategy.

One thing to keep in mind throughout the development process of a successful online training strategy is that simplicity is what makes your online training engaging. Complicating any part of the training is a risky move. Think about this – you are building the eLearning program to simplify an already existing problem. Complicating the course will not help anybody here.

So, talking about keeping things simple, we can’t stress enough that structured content is the best and simplest design. Structured content finds itself as an integral part of every successful online training strategy. From being a part of good user experience to keeping it logical for learners to understand the premise. Even missing out on the basics of structuring a course can create confusion amongst learners. Just imagine big block of texts with no titles and complete chunking, but the text contains information on multiple processes. How can you describe a process using content that does not follow a process of presentation itself?

Structure is key to both designing your content and designing a successful online training strategy!

Well, your courses are really only good as the content and value it brings into the lives of your learners. And that means subject matter experts are important to have on your eLearning development teams. SMEs are responsible for ensuring that the course contains relevant content. You have two options here – either refer to an external SME or select an SME from your existing talent pool. The latter is a better option because your talent knows your training needs better than any other external SME and is better positioned to contribute towards a successful online training strategy

Make your course accessible. Anything that supports training on-the-go and access to training from anywhere is flexible for modern learners. You cannot expect them to be ok with accessing training on one platform only and be tied to that. Modern learners will quickly drop the idea of taking up such training. Instead, give them as many options as possible and that will make your learners happy. Make space for accessibility when designing a successful online training strategy

Feedback is important for your learner’s development and it’s important for your eLearning courses’ success as well. Give your learners the right feedback at the right time. Giving late feedback or incorrect feedback is just setting them up for more failure with regards to their training and development venture. Feedback is a crucial player in designing a successful online training strategy.

So, we already spoke about a few ways in which you can make the courses engaging. But those are design parameters to keep in mind, while building a course and adhering to them will only increase your engagement metrics. But what about actually including some engaging training elements? Think about interactivity, role playing, simulations, animations, and so on. Now we are talking about engaging the audience on a more direct level. This also is a part of the course design because based on what you choose here, your eLearning is going to look a certain way! Design plays a big role in planning out a successful online training strategy.