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What is corporate training, and why is it finally time for a rebrand?
Much like Twitter and Ugg boots, the time has come to rebrand corporate training. (Although unlike Twitter, this rebrand is a good idea – and not helmed by Elon Musk.)
If the phrase “corporate training” elicits a response in you that is akin to hearing a bedtime lullaby, you’re not alone. According to a survey on employee sentiment towards workplace learning, employees were less likely to say their organisation offers relevant training when compared with the year prior.
It seems we’re overdue for a shake-up. In order to move away from “nap-inducing” and towards engaging and relevant, we need to rebrand what corporate training can mean, be, and do for people. In this blog, we’ll break down the actionable steps you can take to move beyond bland box-ticking and deliver corporate training programmes that truly land.
Before we tackle exactly how we’re going to drag corporate training – kicking and screaming – into a modern rebrand, let’s define what we’re actually talking about. What does corporate training mean?
The process of corporate training is exactly what it sounds like: a corporation provides training, learning and development opportunities to its employees. It’s an umbrella term that can cover a wide range of topics including technical skills, product knowledge, compliance and soft skills amongst many others.
With all this important ground it covers, we believe corporate training deserves a better reputation. So here are our top tips to help you “rebrand” your internal training programmes.
At the heart of any good rebrand, there is a shift in perspective. That’s what it comes down to: changing perceptions. And we can transform corporate training’s historically boring reputation by changing peoples’ perception of what it can look like.
How do you do this? The first step is to shift the focus away from the organisation, and towards the individuals who make up that organisation. No human is born corporate, but we are born with an innate desire to learn and improve. By thinking about how corporate training can benefit your employees, you place them at the centre and connect them to the real benefit of their learning.
Secondly, rather than treating corporate training as an uninviting, mandatory item on a “To-Do” list, frame it as an opportunity: to learn, to protect the company’s employees, to connect people… whatever it is, connect to the reason behind the training and channel that into your communication surrounding it.
When employees are able to connect to a purpose or story behind their training, it’s more likely to land; a concept we’ve covered in our blog The role of joy in learning design:
“Humans love stories - whether it’s a piece of history, a grand adventure taken by a group of unwitting hobbits, or the local neighbourhood drama about the bins. From small but intriguing to grand and sweeping, stories of all shapes and sizes have been keeping us entertained – and educated – for centuries.
That’s why it’s such a valuable part of learning. Using storytelling and real-world examples to illustrate your points will not only keep your learners engaged, but it will help them remember the information by enabling them to apply it to their own lives.”
This is most applicable to compliance training, but it’s an important thing to keep in mind for all aspects of workplace learning. In the words of Simon Sinek, “find your why.”
Another core tenet of a rebrand is building excitement, and – to borrow a marketing term – “buzz.”
Building anticipation around your workplace training programmes starts with bringing your employees together and encouraging communication. For a real-world example of how to do this successfully, we need look no further than Thrive customer and skincare industry icon, DECIEM.
Prior to launching the learning platform to their workforce, 78% of employees felt like they didn’t know what was going on in the wider business and 42% felt they didn't have a voice. DECIEM knew that for a game-changing brand on the cutting edge of skincare, this stale workplace learning wasn’t going to cut it – and partnered with Thrive to shake things up.
This is where the community and communication elements come in. Instead of pushing back against the “Tik-Tok-ification” of skincare that had seen millions of users organically sharing their products online, DECIEM leaned into it. Harnessing Thrive’s communication functionality to share videos, photos and tutorials from across the internet, they embraced their virality as an essential component of their reputation and used it to teach their employees about their products.
And the communication doesn’t stop there. They regularly make use of the Broadcasts feature to announce news from across the business, and encourage their staff to share their own updates – everything from product developments, to a cute dog spotted in one of their retail stores – therefore connecting everyone, and encouraging wider knowledge sharing throughout the business.
All of this has led them away from those discouraging employee sentiment stats, and towards an engagement score of 95%.
Learn from DECIEM: It’s so important to cultivate a sense of community, ease and communication around these programmes and empower people to share.
If you’ve never heard this expression before, it might seem like a strange thing to say in a blog about corporate training – so allow us to expand. “Eat the frog” is a famous piece of advice originally coined by Mark Twain, and later popularised by productivity expert Brian Tracy. It simply refers to the concept of doing the hardest or most boring thing first, followed by the more enjoyable tasks.
For our purposes, the concept of “eating the frog” can be applied to a traditionally “boring” exercise like compliance training. Getting this stage finished early allows both you and your learners the freedom to move on to more engaging things.
The fact is, compliance training is absolutely essential when it comes to safeguarding your company and its employees, therefore an indispensable part of corporate training programmes. Empowering your employees to complete this stage first means they will be more receptive to any additional learning beyond it.
The benefits of gamification have been frequently discussed – particularly by us here at Thrive – and factoring gamification into your corporate training will be a huge help in making it more exciting. There is a lot of research that proves a positive correlation between gamification and effective learning, as we’ve covered in our blog The importance of gamification in learning:
“When you complete a task, earn a badge, or any other achievements that are baked into the gamified learning process, your brain releases dopamine, which makes you feel happy and motivated. This is why it’s such a precious and useful thing to capitalise on: why wouldn’t you want to encourage your people to keep coming back to their professional development; keep climbing the leaderboard; feel happy and motivated while doing so?”
Gamified elements like leaderboards, rewards, quizzes and certificates can make a huge difference when it comes to engaging your employees in their training. The easiest way to implement these elements is through the use of an all-in-one learning platform like Thrive, and the stats speak for themselves:
- This study explored the use of “low-stakes retrieval practice” (that is, quizzes that didn’t impact the students’ grades but merely served as a way to enhance their learning) on students’ ability to recall information.
Obviously this study concerns academic education, but its findings can very easily be applied to workplace learning and development.
Students who took part in this “repeated learning” remembered 60% of the assigned material, compared to just 40% for those who didn’t.
- This study found that when certification is removed from elearning, completion rates are almost halved. Halved. That’s a very large percentage of your workforce that are ending up non-compliant or never even looking at the course in the first place.
- Research by Ding-Chau Wang & Yong-Ming Huang compared the effectiveness of both “competition” and “collaboration” in learning, and saw competition come out on top:
“Perceived competition is a factor more significant than perceived collaboration behind learning performance, in which perceived competition directly affects perceived collaboration.”
What do you think? Have we encouraged you to shift your mindset on corporate training, and shake up your learning initiatives? If you want to continue the conversation find us over on LinkedIn.
Explore what impact Thrive could make for your team and your learners today.
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What is corporate training, and why is it finally time for a rebrand?
Much like Twitter and Ugg boots, the time has come to rebrand corporate training. (Although unlike Twitter, this rebrand is a good idea – and not helmed by Elon Musk.)
If the phrase “corporate training” elicits a response in you that is akin to hearing a bedtime lullaby, you’re not alone. According to a survey on employee sentiment towards workplace learning, employees were less likely to say their organisation offers relevant training when compared with the year prior.
It seems we’re overdue for a shake-up. In order to move away from “nap-inducing” and towards engaging and relevant, we need to rebrand what corporate training can mean, be, and do for people. In this blog, we’ll break down the actionable steps you can take to move beyond bland box-ticking and deliver corporate training programmes that truly land.
Before we tackle exactly how we’re going to drag corporate training – kicking and screaming – into a modern rebrand, let’s define what we’re actually talking about. What does corporate training mean?
The process of corporate training is exactly what it sounds like: a corporation provides training, learning and development opportunities to its employees. It’s an umbrella term that can cover a wide range of topics including technical skills, product knowledge, compliance and soft skills amongst many others.
With all this important ground it covers, we believe corporate training deserves a better reputation. So here are our top tips to help you “rebrand” your internal training programmes.
At the heart of any good rebrand, there is a shift in perspective. That’s what it comes down to: changing perceptions. And we can transform corporate training’s historically boring reputation by changing peoples’ perception of what it can look like.
How do you do this? The first step is to shift the focus away from the organisation, and towards the individuals who make up that organisation. No human is born corporate, but we are born with an innate desire to learn and improve. By thinking about how corporate training can benefit your employees, you place them at the centre and connect them to the real benefit of their learning.
Secondly, rather than treating corporate training as an uninviting, mandatory item on a “To-Do” list, frame it as an opportunity: to learn, to protect the company’s employees, to connect people… whatever it is, connect to the reason behind the training and channel that into your communication surrounding it.
When employees are able to connect to a purpose or story behind their training, it’s more likely to land; a concept we’ve covered in our blog The role of joy in learning design:
“Humans love stories - whether it’s a piece of history, a grand adventure taken by a group of unwitting hobbits, or the local neighbourhood drama about the bins. From small but intriguing to grand and sweeping, stories of all shapes and sizes have been keeping us entertained – and educated – for centuries.
That’s why it’s such a valuable part of learning. Using storytelling and real-world examples to illustrate your points will not only keep your learners engaged, but it will help them remember the information by enabling them to apply it to their own lives.”
This is most applicable to compliance training, but it’s an important thing to keep in mind for all aspects of workplace learning. In the words of Simon Sinek, “find your why.”
Another core tenet of a rebrand is building excitement, and – to borrow a marketing term – “buzz.”
Building anticipation around your workplace training programmes starts with bringing your employees together and encouraging communication. For a real-world example of how to do this successfully, we need look no further than Thrive customer and skincare industry icon, DECIEM.
Prior to launching the learning platform to their workforce, 78% of employees felt like they didn’t know what was going on in the wider business and 42% felt they didn't have a voice. DECIEM knew that for a game-changing brand on the cutting edge of skincare, this stale workplace learning wasn’t going to cut it – and partnered with Thrive to shake things up.
This is where the community and communication elements come in. Instead of pushing back against the “Tik-Tok-ification” of skincare that had seen millions of users organically sharing their products online, DECIEM leaned into it. Harnessing Thrive’s communication functionality to share videos, photos and tutorials from across the internet, they embraced their virality as an essential component of their reputation and used it to teach their employees about their products.
And the communication doesn’t stop there. They regularly make use of the Broadcasts feature to announce news from across the business, and encourage their staff to share their own updates – everything from product developments, to a cute dog spotted in one of their retail stores – therefore connecting everyone, and encouraging wider knowledge sharing throughout the business.
All of this has led them away from those discouraging employee sentiment stats, and towards an engagement score of 95%.
Learn from DECIEM: It’s so important to cultivate a sense of community, ease and communication around these programmes and empower people to share.
If you’ve never heard this expression before, it might seem like a strange thing to say in a blog about corporate training – so allow us to expand. “Eat the frog” is a famous piece of advice originally coined by Mark Twain, and later popularised by productivity expert Brian Tracy. It simply refers to the concept of doing the hardest or most boring thing first, followed by the more enjoyable tasks.
For our purposes, the concept of “eating the frog” can be applied to a traditionally “boring” exercise like compliance training. Getting this stage finished early allows both you and your learners the freedom to move on to more engaging things.
The fact is, compliance training is absolutely essential when it comes to safeguarding your company and its employees, therefore an indispensable part of corporate training programmes. Empowering your employees to complete this stage first means they will be more receptive to any additional learning beyond it.
The benefits of gamification have been frequently discussed – particularly by us here at Thrive – and factoring gamification into your corporate training will be a huge help in making it more exciting. There is a lot of research that proves a positive correlation between gamification and effective learning, as we’ve covered in our blog The importance of gamification in learning:
“When you complete a task, earn a badge, or any other achievements that are baked into the gamified learning process, your brain releases dopamine, which makes you feel happy and motivated. This is why it’s such a precious and useful thing to capitalise on: why wouldn’t you want to encourage your people to keep coming back to their professional development; keep climbing the leaderboard; feel happy and motivated while doing so?”
Gamified elements like leaderboards, rewards, quizzes and certificates can make a huge difference when it comes to engaging your employees in their training. The easiest way to implement these elements is through the use of an all-in-one learning platform like Thrive, and the stats speak for themselves:
- This study explored the use of “low-stakes retrieval practice” (that is, quizzes that didn’t impact the students’ grades but merely served as a way to enhance their learning) on students’ ability to recall information.
Obviously this study concerns academic education, but its findings can very easily be applied to workplace learning and development.
Students who took part in this “repeated learning” remembered 60% of the assigned material, compared to just 40% for those who didn’t.
- This study found that when certification is removed from elearning, completion rates are almost halved. Halved. That’s a very large percentage of your workforce that are ending up non-compliant or never even looking at the course in the first place.
- Research by Ding-Chau Wang & Yong-Ming Huang compared the effectiveness of both “competition” and “collaboration” in learning, and saw competition come out on top:
“Perceived competition is a factor more significant than perceived collaboration behind learning performance, in which perceived competition directly affects perceived collaboration.”
What do you think? Have we encouraged you to shift your mindset on corporate training, and shake up your learning initiatives? If you want to continue the conversation find us over on LinkedIn.
Explore what impact Thrive could make for your team and your learners today.
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