The 5 Best Examples of Employee Training and Development Programs

LinkedIn’s latest Workplace Report found that people who aren’t learning in your organization will leave. 

So, how can you help employees upskill to be better at their jobs and motivate them to stay in the company? One effective tool available to L&D teams is employee training and development programs.

In this article, we’ll define employee training and development and its importance, showcase five concrete examples of training programs (with high-profile case studies), and provide four tips to help you get your development programs up and running.

First, what is employee training and development?

What is employee training and development? 

Employee training and development is the process of designing, creating, and delivering courses for employee learning.

For example, L&D teams use training and development programs to onboard new hires, match mentors with mentees to boost professional development, or close an organization’s skills gaps through upskilling or reskilling initiatives. 

By providing thorough and customized training and development programs, you and your team can enhance employees' skills so they excel in their roles, increase their job satisfaction, and clarify their career development.

Next, let’s look at how training and development programs contribute to your company's business goals. 

The importance of employee training programs

The benefits of employee training programs range from those that impact employees to those that affect an organization’s bottom line.

Employee training programs are essential for organizations seeking an upskilled and knowledgeable workforce. L&D teams can leverage training and development to empower employees to gain the skills they need to succeed in their company and industry.

Without precisely planned training programs, companies can’t expect to make an impact on employee retention. Well-designed development programs make it easy to showcase that your organization cares about employees’ professional growth. If they see the company as one that supports their career development, they will be more likely to stay. 

In fact, according to our survey of over 1,000 American employees, self-directed learning and career development training were seen as the most appealing options for people looking to reskill:

Streamlined and robust training programs will also increase employee performance, improve job satisfaction, and boost employee engagement. 

Next, let’s look at the five best examples of employee training and development programs.

5 best examples of employee training & development programs (with case studies)

From onboarding to leadership development, many employee training programs can be tweaked to fit your organization’s bespoke needs. 

Today, we’ll look at five examples of employee training and development programs, each with a quick case study for some real-world inspiration.

1. Onboarding

Onboarding or new hire training helps new employees understand their roles and responsibilities and how they fit within the organization.

L&D leverages employee onboarding training programs to introduce new hires to the organization. The learning process will include standardized milestones that help new employees understand and learn about the company, co-workers, and their new role. 

Case study: Onboarding at Aircall

Aircall is the cloud-based call center and phone system of choice for modern businesses. 

With 650 employees, the company is growing fast. To meet the pace of their growth, the L&D team restructured their onboarding program to make it scalable, interactive, and collaborative.

Leveraging 360Learning, the team at Aircall increased the efficiency of their onboarding training programs by empowering subject-matter experts to work with the L&D team to create business-specific onboarding courses.

By boosting knowledge sharing across the organization, the L&D team has scaled their onboarding and broader employee training with impactful, demonstrable results ranging from onboarding 40 new hires with only one full-time employee to impacting professional development with high numbers of employees contributing to course creation. 

2. Technical upskilling 

Upskilling is training that gives employees new skills and competencies to help them do their jobs better.

Skill development is a crucial area of learning and development. By designing and deploying upskilling employee training programs, L&D teams can increase employee productivity, streamline succession planning, and increase employee retention.

Technical training focuses on teaching employees the specific skills they need, including operating machinery and using company software. By increasing employee competencies, technical upskilling can ensure that they are performing at a high level in their current roles and that they will prepared for future positions.

Case study: Upskilling at Amazon

Amazon’s $1.2 billion Upskilling 2025 programs focus on supporting employees to learn critical skills for the in-demand, higher-paying technical or non-technical roles.

For example, the Amazon Technical Academy equips non-technical Amazon employees with the necessary skills to pursue successful careers in software engineering. The in-person training courses leverage instructor-led and project-based training sessions with a significant focus on applying the skills in the real world.

Amazon also included a new skill development program, AWS Training and Certification, which helps employees of all roles and backgrounds to work in the AWS cloud. The learning program includes instructor-led training, gamification, and exam certification. 

3. Professional development

Encouraging your employees to participate in professional development training can be an incredible way to help them upskill and boost their career development.

Professional development training programs utilize various learning approaches, such as mentoring, self-paced eLearning, and online webinars, to enable employees to achieve their career goals and increase job satisfaction.

Successful L&D teams will also leverage professional development plans alongside career development training programs to help support employee retention, boost upskilling, and help meet the organization’s business goals.

Case study: Professional development at Netflix

The streaming giant Netflix runs the 12-week Pathways Bootcamp, a part-time training program that equips employees with the necessary development skills. 

After completion, employees gain access to post-course training materials and online tutorials to help them face common programming challenges the streaming industry faces. Employees can also engage in mentoring opportunities with Netflix professionals to help with their career development. 

To enhance company culture, the Pathways Bootcamp development program focuses on learners from historically underrepresented communities. The New Grad Program also helps new hires build community and networks through training programs on Netflix culture, including professional development. 

4.  Mentoring

Mentoring is a type of training that promotes human connections and involves transferring knowledge, skills, and experience from one person to another. 

As a training method, mentoring includes traditional one-on-one or reverse mentoring, where older, more experienced individuals learn from younger ones. Mentorship programs promote and strengthen a culture of learning and drive diversity initiatives.

Case study: Mentoring at Spotify

Employees at Spotify can use the music streaming platform’s internal talent marketplace, Echo, to build their career portfolios and generate connections across a global workforce. 

One of the ways Echo offers job opportunities is through mentoring, which allows employees anywhere across the globe to connect and learn from a mentor at Spotify. Echo uses artificial intelligence to match mentors and mentees based on skills automatically, and best practices developed by the L&D team guide the relationship. 

5. Leadership development

Leadership training is a type of soft skill training that focuses on interpersonal abilities, emphasizing leadership qualities and skill sets that influence directing others.

Leadership training aims to cultivate skilled leaders capable of positively impacting their teams and contributing to the company's success. Effective leadership development programs will prioritize soft skills such as communication, decision-making, conflict resolution, and delegation.

Case study: Leadership development at Bank of America

At the Bank of America, the leadership investment initiatives offer a range of leadership development training programs.

For example, the Women’s Next Level Leadership Program focuses on helping multicultural women with their career development through assessments, strategies, and tactics offered in an eight-month virtual online learning experience.

Additionally, the New Manager Program empowers new or promoted managers’ upskilling to lead their teams successfully. The training program includes interactive and personalized learning resources to fit each individual employee’s learning style and needs.  

With those inspiring employee training and development examples in mind, let's shift our focus to helping you establish an impactful talent management program.

4 Tips for Creating a Great Training and Development Program

If you’re going to design and manage training and development programs that impact employee upskilling and meet business goals, we’ve got four tips to get you started. 

First, you’ll need to ensure that your training goals align with your organization’s business goals.

1. Align training goals with business goals

A successful employee training program provides team members with valuable skills to achieve company goals.

You'll need to conduct a training needs analysis to ensure you achieve this alignment between these objectives. As a critical aspect of learning and development decision-making, a training needs analysis will identify the skills your employees need to do their job well. 

For example, suppose your analysis shows that your workforce needs help to meet the demands of the digital and hybrid working environment. In that case, you can design upskilling and reskilling development programs that build on existing skills or train employees in new areas.

2. Choose an employee training method that is right for your needs

Depending on the results of your training needs analysis and identified skills gaps, you may need to implement different training methods in your development programs. 

Here are some different learning preferences and training methods to consider when decking your development plans:

• In-person training: Any form of learning where the employee is present in person, such as instructional seminars or hands-on training. 
• Online employee training: Also called virtual or eLearning, online training takes place on the Internet and can include online courses, mobile learning, and collaborative learning experiences. 
• Blended learning: Combines online training methods with in-person training. 
• Peer training: An active and engaging learning approach that empowers employees to build training courses based on their skill sets.

3. Employee training tools

You will need an employee training tool to help design, curate, manage, and measure your training programs company-wide. 

A learning management system is the go-to solution for creating, distributing, and monitoring your online training courses. However, when it comes to creating impactful employee training programs, we recommend that you invest in an all-in-one solution. 

A modern and competitive learning platform like 360Learning will empower you to automate your L&D busy work with a click, leverage AI to identify and grow the skills you need, and collaborative learning-based academies to drive your upskilling training programs. 

Leveraging a learning platform will help you deliver your training programs quickly, save you time and money in the long run, and generate metrics and reports to prove your impact on business goals.

4. Improve training and development programs and measure ROI

We recommend that you measure the impact of your training programs, collect feedback, and update training materials to ensure they are as effective as possible.

Proving the return on investment (ROI) of your training and development programs is vital in justifying your budget and getting that crucial stakeholder buy-in and support. You can collect metrics such as engagement, program completion, and relevance scores to illustrate how employees consume your training courses. 

We recommend that when you start designing your training programs, you start with the end in mind. Ensure that before you plan your training, you understand the organization’s business goals and your organization’s skills gaps. 

Starting with the end in mind will make proving ROI so much easier. For extra tips on measuring the impact of your training programs, check out our 3 Data-Based Ways To Prove Training ROI (+ Free Training ROI Calculator).

Collaborative learning empowers training and development

You’re welcome to use these 25 employee training templates and checklists for better training programs and these best practices in training and development to help kick off your training program journey. 

Better yet, a comprehensive learning platform like 360Learning combines collaborative learning Academies, AI-powered L&D, and the features of an LMS and an LXP to help you design, curate, and manage training programs at scale and pace. 

Book your free online demo now to see how we can help you create an outstanding training and development program that will fit in with the five examples above!