The Three Types of Training

Part Three: Transitional Training

In this miniseries, we’re going to give you everything you need to understand the three most important types of training:

• New employee onboarding
• Ongoing Employee Training
• Transitional Training

The third and last essential type of training that we’d like to share is transitional training.

Transitional training is the middle ground between onboarding and ongoing employee training. It allows your team members to stay up-to-date with the responsibilities associated with their role.

What is Transitional Training?

Whenever anyone within your business is promoted, changes teams, or has any substantial change to their current role, transitional training is what they should undergo to develop their skills to the level they need.

Whilst it’s essential to bear in mind the employee’s existing knowledge and understanding, there are likely gaps that will need to be filled, and this should be managed proactively, as you would with ongoing training.

Any additional policies and procedures that are relevant to the new role should be considered as part of the training, as well as any upskilling required.

How Does it Work?

Transitional training works by following an employee throughout their time in the business and ensuring they are given the right information and skills at each point in their career as they move up the ladder.

By implementing this form of training, you move team members through increasing and incremental depths of involvement and responsibility as time goes on, allowing them to develop confidence and skills in problem-solving, collaborative learning and teamwork, decision-making, organisation, and self-responsibility..

Where Do You Begin with Transitional Training?

Four different areas should be looking into when delivering transitional training to your employees.

Focus: On the team member personally, what they offer already and what is important to them.

Direction: Where do they want to go in their career? What appeals to them, and how suitable are they for this type of work?

Adaptability: How adaptable are they to make these changes?

Self-knowledge and drive: Are they able to push themselves forward in their career? Do they have good self-esteem?

Once you have identified these areas for your employee, you can begin building the training process.

Creating a Beneficial Transitional Training Program

As with every form of training, at Whale, we have a recommended structure for developing your transitional training program.

The key areas that you should focus your attention on are:

Projective: discuss the attitudes and responsibilities required for the new job and ensure your employee is comfortable with the overall direction of this.

Cognitive: provide a documented framework of knowledge related to the job, giving yourself and the employee a foundation of technical information to refer back to before moving onto the more practical steps.

Application: this is where the skills are applied to the job, making the transition from ‘knowledge-based’ elements practical. This is where procedures and processes relevant to the role should be introduced.

Synthesis: anticipate and resolve any potential problems that could affect the employee’s performance, such as a skills gap or lack of confidence. These should be documented and reviewed to ensure they are resolved over time.

Group reinforcement: reinforce the standpoint of group accountability and who is responsible for which areas within the team. The employee should be aware that each team member has their responsibility, and there should be no competition throughout.

Self-direction: ensure the employee maintains the initiative to push themselves forward whenever they see fit

Learning style should also be taken into account throughout the training process to ensure the employee is given the best possible chance of success. It would help if you always worked together with the team member to understand their preferred way to progress and learn.

Your ongoing training checklist

Good employee training should be based on the following checklist:

1. You must be happy to work in a partnership with your employee to provide a full training program and ensure the best results
   
2. The training must align with the newly introduced responsibilities or other changes
   
3. The employee should be allowed to provide feedback, allowing you to improve processes where necessary
   
4. The training should be reviewed regularly to ensure it remains fit for purpose and any further changes to responsibilities are taken into account
   
5. Policies and procedures should be in place to ensure that any misconduct can be dealt with fairly and judiciously. Policies should be built to make employees accountable for such behaviors and have fair consequences
   
6. Employees should be expected to self-motivate themselves throughout the training and highlight any areas which need specific focus
   
7. Equal training opportunities should be provided to any staff members moving through the same process, whether it be for promotion, upskilling, or redundancy

Who Can Benefit from Transitional Training?

There is a wide range of people who can benefit from transitional training, including:

• Those are moving up the ranks within an organisation with new accountabilities.
• An employee using new tools & products within the organisation
• Existing workers in precarious employment situations
• Workers experiencing retrenchment and redundancy
• Learning communities and learning organisations
• ...

How Whale can help

At Whale, we pride ourselves on being the experts in internal learning and processes. We are here to help you reimagine how you train and empower your team, providing the resource for delivering contextual content to your teams in their moment of need and allowing them to learn in a more gratifying and effective way.

If you want to find out more about transitional training processes, or any other training information at all, get in touch with us today!

If you’d like help with your ongoing training procedures, get in touch with us today!