23 Employee Training Templates and Checklists for Better Training Programs

When it comes to offering employee training programs, your company can’t afford to wait. Your teams are looking for more than just a paycheck—they want more opportunities for development. Many learning and development teams have realized that investing in employees through training leads to better retention, productivity, and satisfaction. In fact, a recent LinkedIn survey revealed that nearly half of L&D teams have put upskilling and reskilling employees at the top of their list for 2022.

To cultivate a highly engaged and high-performing team, you need an employee training program that can deliver results. But, if you’ve never built a structured training program, it can be challenging to start from scratch.

While your company’s employee training program will need to be crafted to meet your organization's unique requirements and goals, you can use pre-built training plan templates and checklists as jumping-off points to build a scalable and productive training initiative.

We’ve gathered some of the top employee training checklists and templates and paired them with some of our best tips for building a better employee training program. Use these resources as the building blocks to help you design a dynamic, scalable training process for your organization, and download our handy employee training checklist to speed up the process and make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

Employee training policy templates

Training policies are the foundation of your program. Launching a brand-new L&D program involves a lot of decision-making. It can be challenging to know where to start. These employee training policy templates can help you nail this step by making sure you don't miss anything important when writing your first policy.

If you're putting together a formalized employee training plan, perhaps based on a collaborative learning approach, start by writing a policy that covers your organization's approach to or perspective on training and how it supports growth. Your training policy should include the following essential components.

• The objective or purpose of your program. To build a training program that will get C-suite buy-in, align your goals with the overarching company strategy (see our Chief Learning Officer roadmap for more details).
• Responsibilities. Outline the roles involved and the expectations of each. Include duties for program organizers, course creators, and learners.
• Types of employee training available. You may offer online, in-person, or blended learning programs. They may take place independently on the employee's own time or in groups. Outline each type of training, its scope, and potential availability to employees.
• Guidelines for participation. Outline the procedure for creating new courses or programs and the guidelines for employee participation.

These training policy templates offer concrete examples of how to structure your guidelines:

• 11 Training Policy Templates (Template.net)
• Employee Training and Development Policy (Workable)
• Employee Training Policy Example (Keka)

Training plan needs assessment templates

At its core, providing valuable training to employees is about identifying the most pressing training needs and then fulfilling those needs through courses, seminars, or other learning materials. But how do you pinpoint what your employees need to learn?

Traditionally, managers or L&D leaders have owned the training needs analysis process. They identify areas where they think employees would benefit from training, then push those needs to the appropriate parties. The problem with this top-down approach is that it’s time-consuming and not consistently accurate. Without employee input, managers are simply making their best guess.

Instead, we recommend a bottom-up approach to training needs analysis, where you source potential training needs directly from employees. Employees propose possible training courses based on their experience and the gaps they see in their knowledge. With the right tools (like a learning platform that combines collaborative tools with the power of a Learning Management System), you can even have employees vote on each other’s ideas. This ranking system helps you determine the scope of each potential training need. Using our platform, for instance, employees can upvote learning needs, which improves the visibility of skills they're most interested in learning.

After you’ve created a list of employee-sourced training needs, learning managers should prioritize them in terms of their potential impact on employee performance and the cost and effort to fulfill them. This skills gap analysis will help you choose which training to create first and which to put on the back burner.

These training plan templates can help you assess and prioritize training needs:

• Training Needs Assessment Template (Excel Templates)
• Training Plan Template (Process.st)
• Employee Training Gantt Chart Template (Template.net)
• Free Training Plan Templates for Business Use (Smartsheet)

Employee development plan templates

You can create the most impactful learning content the corporate world has ever seen, but it won't matter if your teams don't know how to find and use it. Employee development plans serve as a roadmap for individuals, outlining what they need to do to enhance their skills and progress within your organization.

Organizations employ development plans throughout the employee lifecycle to:

• Guide new hires through onboarding
• Boost performance for struggling employees as a component of a performance improvement plan
• Manage corporate reskilling or lateral company shifts
• Help ambitious employees reach new levels of success

Ideally, every employee should have a customized development plan to guide their training journey. Managers are typically responsible for setting these learning paths during conversations with employees about their goals and knowledge gaps.

Employees would then pursue these learning goals by taking courses and finding other learning opportunities like listening to podcasts or taking specialized LinkedIn courses. This self-directed learning isn't just more efficient; it also encourages employees to take complete ownership of their career ambitions.

There are many different ways to organize and format an employee development plan. At 360Learning, we use Trello to create a macro view of major training processes, like onboarding.

These training templates can help you build your employee development plans:

• 30 60 90 Day Plan Template (Trello)
• 90-Day Plan Template (Confluence)
• Employee Development Plan Template (Process.st)
• Employee Development Plan Template (DevSkiller)
• Individual Development Plan Template (Indeed)
• Employee Development Resources Template (Airtable)
• Free Employee Training Plan Template to Speed up Onboarding (Monday)
• Performance Improvement Plan Template (Atlassian)

Employee tracking and training schedule templates

After you’ve laid out learning objectives and a training roadmap, you need to track each employee’s progress toward those goals.

We present these tracking and training schedule templates with a caveat: tracking training progress manually is becoming increasingly obsolete. It’s far more efficient to invest in a learning platform that automatically tracks employee progress and performance. The right software makes it much easier to keep tabs on each employee's training progress.

• Employee Training Management Template (Airtable)
• Employee Training Record Template (At Your Business)
• Employee Training Schedule Template (Template.net)
• HR Team Learning Tracker (Trello)
• New Employee Training Tracker (Excel Templates)
• Training Record Template (JotForm)

Training ROI templates

It's essential to measure your training programs' ROI to prove their efficacy and get more buy-in and a bigger budget. Training ROI templates can help you gather the data you need. While it can be easy to let ROI reporting slide, keeping careful records of your program’s impact and overall benefit to the company is crucial for the long-term health and growth of your L&D program.

But measuring training ROI is notoriously difficult. How do you assign quantifiable value to improvements that are primarily qualitative?

We have a few tips.

• Start each training program with concrete goals for what success should look like. Whenever possible, attach numbers to these goals to create a better understanding of what someone is working toward. Instead of "improve customer service," try "achieve an average Net Promoter Score of 7." These goals should also tie to larger company initiatives, like "building a better customer experience."
• Take a baseline measurement before you begin training. Initial metrics will help you measure change over time. For example, if you're working on improving customer service, it would be helpful to know what your Net Promoter Score is today.
• Commit to tracking metrics over time. At a bare minimum, you’ll want to track course completion rates to make sure employees finish their training. But the more data you have on how employees use and interact with your courses, the better. Choose a training platform that lets you gather as much data analytics as possible.
• Use integrations when possible. Some online learning platforms will connect with other tools to help you directly measure the impact of training. For example, you can connect 360Learning with your CRM to measure the effect of training on sales performance.

Here are some helpful training templates for calculating and documenting your program’s ROI:

• Employee Engagement Survey Template (Airtable)
• Training Cost Calculator (Excel Templates)
• Training ROI Calculator (360Learning)

Simplify your training process with the right training tool

Training templates are great for fleshing out your training programs, but to create a scalable, sustainable online training program, you also need the right software.

A great eLearning software platform will automate many of the processes described above, eliminating paperwork and potential disorganization and confusion. Automation saves a great deal of time, eliminates redundancy, and allows L&D leaders to focus on the most critical parts of a great employee training program: robust goals, impactful content, and innovative thinking. And when you’re not bogged down in paperwork, you can focus on the greater purpose of actually helping employees learn, grow, and get results.

360Learning makes it easy to assess training needs, create individualized learning paths, and track employee performance, course completion, and ROI. It also lets your employees collaborate and create courses, so they can learn from one another.

Interested in seeing 360Learning in action? Book a demo whenever you like.