Employee Training: The Introductory Guide for Modern Teams

The skills employees need are constantly changing.

New technologies, evolving roles and shifting business priorities mean organizations need to keep developing their people.

Companies are investing heavily in that effort. Research from Josh Bersin shows that corporate learning spending grew by double digits over two years, reaching more than $1,400 per employee annually on average.

But spending more doesn't automatically produce better training. HR and L&D teams still need to identify the right skills gaps, choose suitable training methods, create useful learning content and measure whether employees are actually improving.

This guide covers the entire process. We’ll look at how to identify training needs, create an employee training plan, choose the right methods and delivery formats, develop training materials and measure effectiveness. You’ll also find examples, templates and practical resources you can use to build or improve your own employee training program.

New to employee training? Watch our Employee Training 101 video below for a quick introduction to the fundamentals.

Table of Contents

• What is Training and Development?
• Why is Training and Development Important?
• Types of Employee Training
• How to Create an Employee Training Program
• The Best Tools for Your Employee Training and Development Programs
• Common Types of Employee Training Content and Materials

What Is Training and Development?

Training and development is the process of building the knowledge, skills and capabilities employees need for their current job and future growth. It sits within the broader Learning and Development (L&D) function, which connects employee learning to company goals.

L&D teams strategize, plan, create, deliver and track training programs. They also support career progression and manage learning technology. L&D contributes to company culture, but leadership, HR and managers shape it together.

What Is the Difference Between Training and Development?

Training and development are split into two related but distinct functions, each with its own type of program.

• Training addresses the knowledge or skills employees need to perform their current tasks or roles.
• Development takes a longer-term view, helping employees build capabilities for broader responsibilities, career progression and future roles.

The infographic below summarizes the major differences.

Why Is Training and Development Important?

Training and development affect not only the individuals in an organization but also the organization as a whole. Here are five data-backed reasons why training and development are worth your time and budget.

• Improved job performance: Training gives employees the skills they need to do their jobs well and adapt to the situation at hand. Lighthouse Research & Advisory's 2024 study states that workers with proper training are 86% more likely to describe themselves as adaptable to change.
• Increased job satisfaction: Employees want to see a path forward, and they'll leave if they don't. According to Randstad's 2025 Workmonitor, 41% of workers would quit a job that didn't offer them development opportunities to future-proof their career, up from 29% the year before.
• Improved quality of work: Training can give employees better techniques and methods for their job, and many HR professionals see that reflected in performance. According to HR.com's Future of Upskilling and Employee Learning 2025 report, 68% agree that upskilling leads to a substantial improvement in job performance.
• Competitive advantage: Skill gaps slow a business down, whether it's slower product launches, more errors or work that has to be redone. Training closes those gaps. According to TalentLMS's 2026 L&D Benchmark Report, 42% of HR managers say their organization is grappling with a skills gap.
• Employee growth: Training and development programs give employees room to grow, both in their current role and toward what comes next. HR.com's Future of Upskilling and Employee Learning 2025 report finds that 54% of HR professionals say upskilling has improved employees' career mobility.

Made with Visme Infographic Maker

Types of Employee Training Programs

Training programs are grouped into categories that align with a particular purpose, like onboarding, compliance or skills development.

Below, we break down seven common types of employee training and what each should cover.

We also suggest methods, materials and delivery formats that tend to fit best for each type. Take these suggestions as a starting point; you can then adjust the details to your team's reality.

Onboarding Training for New Hires

Onboarding training covers all the knowledge a new employee needs to do their job. This includes foundational knowledge about their role, information about company policies and the specific skills they’ll need on a day-to-day basis.

This type of training needs to cover a lot of ground, including topics like:

• Company and role orientation: Mission, values, org structure, who's on their team and who to go to for what.
• Policies and procedures: The employee handbook, how PTO works, how performance gets reviewed, how to raise a concern.
• Job-specific skills and tools: The systems, software and workflows they'll use every day, ideally walked through hands-on rather than just handed a manual.
• Products and services: What the company actually sells and how their role fits into that, especially important for customer-facing hires.
• Team introductions and early relationships: Meeting the people they'll actually work with, not just seeing a name on an org chart.

How to Deliver It

Compliance Training

Compliance training covers what employees need to know to meet legal, regulatory, policy and risk requirements. The specific topics depend on the nature of the organization, where it's located, what the work entails and any internal policies or contractual obligations tied to the role.

According to SHRM, no single federal law covers every employer. That’s why specific rules kick in based on your industry, location and workforce.

These are some common compliance training topics that are sometimes complete programs or part of others, like onboarding or sensitivity training.

• Anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training: Covers what counts as harassment or discrimination under the law, how to spot it and how to report it.
• Data privacy and protection training: Teaches employees how to handle personal and company data in compliance with privacy regulations.
• Cybersecurity awareness training: Covers common threats like phishing and malware and what to do when there’s an imminent risk.
• Workplace health and safety training: Required under OSHA and similar regulations for employees exposed to job-site hazards, covering the specific protocols for their industry, including manual handling training for physical roles.
• Diversity, equity and inclusion training: Focuses on building an inclusive workplace and meeting anti-discrimination requirements.
• Ethics and code of conduct training: Covers company values, conflicts of interest and how to make the right call in gray-area situations.
• Workplace violence prevention training: Teaches employees how to spot warning signs and what steps to take if an incident happens.
• Intellectual property training: Explains how to handle patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets without exposing the company to risk.
• HIPAA training: Required for healthcare organizations, covering how to protect patient information and stay compliant with federal law.

How to Deliver It

Skills Training

Skills training refers to any program designed to teach a specific skill. Most skills fall into one of three categories:

• Technical (hard) skills training: Teaches the specific tools, processes or physical tasks someone needs to do their job, like running a machine, navigating a CRM or following proper lifting technique.
• Soft skills training: Covers communication, collaboration, critical thinking and other interpersonal skills that shape how well someone works with a team or a customer. See our guide to soft skills training for a full breakdown.
• AI skills training: Teaches employees how to use AI tools effectively and responsibly in their role, from prompting to knowing when not to rely on them. That creates a clear training gap for many organizations.s. According to a July 2026 report from The Conference Board, 55% of workers regularly use AI at work, but only 1 in 3 have received employer-provided AI training in the past six months.

How to Deliver It

Product Knowledge Training

Product knowledge training teaches employees the ins and outs of your company's own product: what it does, how it works and how to talk about it. This is internal-facing and built for your team.

It’s different from training on the tools employees use to do their jobs, such as an internal wiki or project management software. That falls under technical skills training.

Most of the product knowledge training is directed at customer-facing teams, but it isn't limited to them:

• Sales teams need it to explain value, handle objections and close deals with confidence.
• Support and customer success teams need the technical depth to resolve issues without escalating everything.
• Marketing needs it to write accurate, compelling content for blogs and social media.
• Product and engineering teams often end up leading the training for everyone else, since they're the ones who built it.

How to Deliver It

Leadership and Management Training

Leadership and management training builds the skills people need to lead others, whether that's a first-time manager learning to run one-on-ones or a senior leader preparing for a bigger role.

• Leadership training focuses on vision, influence and decision-making. It teaches people how to set direction, build trust and get buy-in from a team, even when they don't have direct authority over everyone involved.
• Management training focuses on the operational side of leading people: delegating work, giving useful feedback, running effective meetings and catching performance issues before they turn into bigger problems.

Leadership training works alongside succession planning, hiring and performance management to grow people internally. It's how organizations support internal career growth so critical roles don't sit empty when someone leaves. According to DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, only 20% of HR leaders say they have leaders ready to fill their most critical roles, and on average, internal candidates can fill only 49% of critical positions immediately.

How to Deliver It

Refresher Training

Refresher training is a set of ongoing programs that employees take to refresh the knowledge and skills for their role. In some cases, refresher training programs are required by law, especially in organizations that deal with hazardous materials, patient health information or food safety. 

OSHA's Bloodborne Pathogens Standard, for example, requires annual refresher training for anyone with occupational exposure. Other OSHA standards require periodic evaluation instead, which is a different obligation. An evaluation checks whether someone is still performing a task correctly; it doesn't automatically mean retraining, though it can lead to it if a gap shows up.

Another reason for refresher training is when the tools employees are using change or improve. Sometimes refresher training involves unlearning, and that's something you need to consider when building the program.

If someone has done a task the old way for years, muscle memory doesn't just disappear because you handed them a new set of instructions. The training needs to give them room to practice the new way until it replaces the old one.

How to Deliver It

How to Create and Deliver an Employee Training and Development Program

Whether you’re building a corporate training program or a leadership development program, the steps are quite similar. So, for the sake of simplicity, we’ll frame this as a step-by-step tutorial for an employee training program, more specifically, a refresher training for a customer experience team.

Before you begin, decide whether to start with an employee training plan. The answer will depend on your organization's size and whether you need approval from decision-makers to move the project forward. That said, a formal training plan document may not be necessary for every small initiative, but the planning decisions behind it still are.

An employee training plan is a document you put together to organize how the program will be built or to pitch it for approval. Refer to Chapter 1 in this cluster for a detailed guide.

You will notice that a couple of the steps below overlap with the ones in the tutorial for the plan. That is because regardless of whether you choose to use a plan, those steps are non-negotiable.

They are the training needs analysis and the development of a training goal and learning objectives.

If you’d like to watch a video on how to create an employee training program instead, the one below is just what you need.

Step 1. Conduct a Training Needs Analysis

You should never assume that because employees already have experience in their role or industry, they’re likely to understand the company’s needs and goals as they carry out their tasks. This is a formula for misunderstandings, unmet expectations and poor employee integration.

That's why the first step in developing any training program is to conduct a skills gap analysis, a training needs assessment and a performance review. These diagnoses will help you find skill, performance and knowledge gaps.

Once you know what they are, the goal is to determine what is causing the gaps and whether training is the right solution to close them. And if so, it will also tell you what that training needs to cover.

Here are some actions you can take to help you surface those gaps and the reasons behind them. We’ll use the CX team training example to illustrate how these work:

• Review the relevant job roles and responsibilities for the employees you need to train. Use a training matrix to outline the skills each CX role requires, then compare them with what your reps currently possess.
• Look at past and present performance data by checking KPI dashboards, performance reviews and OKR (Objectives and Key Results) statements. In this case, that means pulling response-time trends and any recent customer feedback scores associated with the team.
• Analyze past assessment data from previous training programs or any that are currently running. If your reps already went through a product knowledge training course last quarter, check what it covered and how they scored.
• Speak to both employees and stakeholders to gauge their sentiment on past training programs and their results. Ask the reps directly what's slowing them down, and ask their manager what they're seeing from their side.
• Conduct surveys with employees to understand what skills or knowledge they feel they’re lacking in order to achieve better business outcomes.

Step 2. Set a Training Goal and Aligned Learning Objectives

Let’s continue with the example of the CX team refresher training program. You’ve conducted all the analyses to know exactly where the gaps are. Now it’s time to set a training goal for this program and build out the learning objectives.

The analysis turned up that reps are slow because they're not confident navigating the CRM. A training goal could be: Cut average response time by 20% within 8 weeks of completing training.

From there, break the goal into learning objectives, which are what a rep should be able to do once training is done:

• Log a call in the CRM without having to pause to look for something
• Pull a customer's history and prior tickets in under 30 seconds
• Route an issue to the right team without escalating unnecessarily

If you are creating a training plan first, this is an important section to cover because it sets the scene for decision-makers to understand how your program will bring value. If you’re skipping the plan because you don’t need approval to move forward, this step is still important because it lays the groundwork for the training content and materials production.

Keep your goal and objectives on your brainstorming whiteboard, or create a shareable infographic like the one below.

Create your Infographic with this easy-to-edit template Edit and Download

Step 3. Build Your Training Content and Materials

With clear goals and learning objectives in place, it's time to prepare the training content and materials.

First, work on the content: what you're actually teaching. The content is best done in a document so that all edits and reviews can be completed before designing any materials. Once the content is ready, build the training materials.

This is where Visme can help. Visme is an AI-powered content creation and management system that turns your training content into finished materials fast. Plus, it provides content management features that will help speed up every training production cycle.

A single document containing content for a training program can be used to create several types of materials. For example, the same content can be used in a presentation, a training manual, microlearning modules, an infographic or even a video.

The material you choose to create will depend on your training method, your employee’s work reality and the timeframe you have to work with. Visme supports over 100 content types, so you’ll be sure to find exactly what you need.

Chapter 2 in this cluster will walk you through the content and material creation process in detail.

Can’t wait to see how Visme can help? Here’s a quick look at the different ways you can start creating training content with Visme:

• Generate a first draft with Visme AI. Describe what you need in Visme AI Designer or upload an existing SOP or policy doc as your source material. For compliance or safety content, choose Verbatim so the AI keeps your original wording and doesn’t rewrite it.

• Adapt a template with AI. Pick a training template from Visme's library and use Edit with AI to adapt it to your content by chatting with the AI in the editor.
• Build from a template manually. Visme's library includes templates built specifically for training: manuals, onboarding checklists, job aids and more. Edit one directly if you'd rather have full control over every detail.

• Bring your team in to build it together. Visme's collaboration features let your training and development team edit, annotate and comment on the same project in real time. Role assignment features help you choose who can edit, comment or just view.

Something to consider: You might not need to create the training content and materials yourself. There are plenty of online platforms that offer complete courses for basic skills and safety knowledge. Likewise, you can find local services that send trainers to your workplace or welcome your employees at their facilities.

For customized training tailored to your organization's needs, you can build the content and materials in-house or bring in an instructional designer, agency, consultant or training vendor. Visme is the right tool for building that content, whether your team creates it or an outside partner does.

Step 4. Choose The Best Training Method and Delivery Format

This step is about choosing your training program’s method and delivery formats. As you might have gathered from the list of training types above, the step about content and materials and this one blend together because they can influence the choices you make. Take that into account when developing your training program. In some cases, you might be better off working on steps 3 and 4 simultaneously.

So, what is a training method, and how does it differ from the delivery format?

• The training method is the instructional approach used to teach the content: instructor-led, blended, mentorship or microlearning.
• Delivery Format is the setting in which the method takes place: live in person, live virtual, or self-paced online.

Do these directly correlate with the training type your program will use? Not exactly. What they do need to align with is your training goals, learning objectives and your employee’s day-to-day reality.

This table provides a quick overview of how that works. Chapter 3 in the cluster goes into the details.

Step 5. Run the Program

Once everything is ready to go, it’s time to run the program. Of course, how that’s done will depend on the combination of training materials, methods and formats. But to ensure the roll-out is a success, here are some best practices:

• Communicate before day one. Tell trainees why they're doing this training, not just that they have to do it.

• Make access effortless. Trainees should be able to log in, arrive at or find the training location. Ask trainees if they've checked before the training starts so they don't waste time at the last minute.

• Loop managers in. If you’re running the program from HR, loop in the managers so they can inspire employees to take the training as intended.

• Pilot it first if the stakes are high. Run the program with a small group before the full rollout to catch anything that might be confusing or difficult to follow.

• Decide what happens to stragglers. Figure out the plan for missed deadlines and no-shows.

Step 6. Measure and Improve

After the training cycle is over, you’ll want to measure the program’s success to know what worked, what didn’t and if the program should run again as is or with changes. The best way to calculate overall success is to compare the data to your original training goal.

How you measure success will depend on the training method and delivery formats you use. And different signals will tell you different things. Here are a few:

• Completion rate and quiz scores: The baseline for self-paced eLearning, though they only confirm someone took the course and the quiz, not that anything changed on the job.
• Progress against the mentee's original goals: For mentorship programs, where attendance doesn't tell you anything useful.
• Self-paced score compared against live performance: In blended programs, a strong self-paced score paired with weak live performance signals that the content couldn't be applied, and the reverse signals that the self-paced material didn't hold up without a facilitator explaining it.

Chapter 3 breaks down how to measure each of the nine methods in detail.

To illustrate why this is important, let’s revisit the goal we set earlier for the CX team. It was cutting the average response time by 20% within 8 weeks of training completion. Here’s how the results could have looked:

Eight weeks later, response time was down 14%, short of the 20% goal. Course completion sat at 95% and quiz scores averaged 90%, so the training itself landed well with the reps. Broken down by objective, the reps are faster at logging calls and routing issues, but pulling up customer history has remained slow, improving only slightly.

Before assuming that the training failed, check whether something else is slowing that task down, like a clunky CRM search function, records split across systems or a permissions step that adds extra clicks.

If the tool is the problem, training won't fix it. Flag it to whoever owns the CRM, loop in the rep's manager and note it in the training report so the training isn't blamed for a gap it couldn’t close. If, on the other hand, the tool and process check out, reinforce customer history lookup skills specifically in the next cycle.

The Best Tools for Your Employee Training and Development Programs

Every step of creating and delivering a training or development program requires work. Thankfully, there are tools to help you along the way, making the process faster and more efficient.

Let’s take a look at all the possibilities and how they fit into the flow.

Common Types of Employee Training Content and Materials

Training content and materials can take many different forms. Picking the right one depends on the task, the audience and how the training gets delivered. The table below breaks down the most common types and how each one works best.

Employee Training FAQs

Build Better Employee Training Content with Visme

Building a training program takes real work. Turning what employees need to know into something they will learn isn’t a quick task. Amid all those moving parts, Visme fits right in, helping you create content that goes from plan to finished, on-brand deliverable, ready to plug into whatever LMS or delivery method you're using.

It also solves a couple of problems that arise after the content is built. L&D teams build training programs all the time, and managing the materials library as it grows can get a bit messy.

Without templates that incorporate your brand and reasonable guardrails, versions get scattered across drives and inboxes. Visme’s Workspaces, along with their branded template libraries, keep your team's training content in one place.

Every time you create a new piece of training content or material, like an onboarding checklist, a compliance disclaimer or an infographic, turn it into a branded template and let the entire team use it for the next version.

Get your L&D team set up in Visme and see how much faster the next training program comes together.

Written by Orana Velarde

Orana has been a writer for Visme since 2018, covering topics like design, visual marketing, data visualization and visual content creation. Orana has a background in graphic and web design, makeup artistry for film and theater and ongoingly takes courses on digital marketing, UI/UX and other related topics. See Orana’s work at www.oranavelarde.com.