Best Practices for Scheduling Employee Training
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If you’re responsible for employee training in your company, it’s important to realize that how you approach scheduling training events and opportunities is just as important as the topics that you offer. Having a good training schedule has a lot to do with whether employees will choose to attend optional training programs and if they’ll have a positive attitude toward those that are mandatory.

4 Key Steps to Effectively Schedule Employee Training

As co-owner of a corporate training company, I schedule a combination of public (open enrollment) training seminars and workshops as well as on-site training for a variety of clients. Here are a few of the best practices for scheduling employee training that I currently use, having developed these habits over time – and much trial and error.

1. Start with a blank calendar: When I start working on a training schedule, the first thing I do is print blank monthly calendar pages for the period of time that I am considering, which is usually a quarter or longer. I print a separate page for each month.

2. Block times that vacation absences will be high: Once I have the blank calendar pages, I make notations for time frames during which a lot of people tend to schedule vacation. After all, you don’t want to bring in a trainer at a time that many of the people who need training won’t be there. For example:

• Look up spring break times for the school systems in your area and block those off, as a lot of people will be out of town.

• If a lot of your employees travel out of town to attend college football games in the autumn, block off Fridays during football season for the same reason.

• Mark off one-day holidays (such as Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc.) plus a few days before and after the actual holiday, because a lot of people schedule extra time off for long weekends at these times.

3. Block company or team-specific ‘bad times’ for training: The next thing you should do is consider what internal factors might impact when it’s convenient to schedule employee training. For example:

• If you are scheduling management team training and some of the managers have a big deadline on the 15th of every month, avoid scheduling training on that date, as well as a few days before and the day after.

• If there are particular times of the year when the workload is particularly high and employees end up working a lot of overtime to maintain productivity, don’t schedule training during that time.

• If there are industry conferences that multiple team members typically attend each year, block off that time – at least for training that would affect that particular group and any employees who cover their workload while they’re gone.

4. Make wise choices from what is still available: Going through the above steps allows you to eliminate the most inconvenient times to schedule training. Now it’s time to look at what is left and select the optimal times from the available options. Factors to consider include:

• Look for patterns for recurrent training: If you need to schedule training that will occur in recurring intervals, look closely at your marked up calendar to see if you can find a pattern of available time that will work for the group. For example, one of my clients holds management training on the third Wednesday of the last month of each quarter. Several of her team members have deadlines on the 1st and the 15th, so consistently sticking with the third week avoids inconveniencing them. Mid-week just seems to work well for her team, and sticking with the last month of each quarter allows for scheduling consistency, which is beneficial to everyone involved.

• Consider travel costs if people will need to travel: If you will be bringing team members in from out of town to attend training, choose days that travel costs will be as minimal as possible. Depending on where you will be holding training, room rates and airfare may be higher at the end of the week than earlier. For example, I often teach three-day seminars in New Orleans. Hotel rates there tend to be a good bit higher on Thursday and Friday nights than on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays – so I try to schedule accordingly. I also do training in Dallas-Fort Worth quite often, and I have learned to try to avoid scheduling training sessions that put me on the last flight home on Friday evening because airfare tends to be significantly higher at that time.

• Consider how other events are scheduled: If your company tends to hold most meetings at a certain time of day, it probably makes sense to schedule training sessions during the same timeframe. This isn’t an absolute, of course – but if you can stick with what your employees are used to doing anyway, they may find it easier to adapt their schedules to attend training.

• Consider employee shifts and schedules: If you have several shifts, you may need to hold multiple sessions of each training program. This is the best way to make sure that attendees are able to get the most out of training opportunities. A few years ago, a client sent several employees who had just worked an overnight shift to one of my all-day management seminars. They stopped working at 7 am and were at my office by 9 am for a class that lasted until 4 pm, then they had to go back to work for their 11 pm shift. There is no way that they really got anything from the training and no good comes from having employees driving or working while exhausted. It would have been better to schedule on-site training during their shift.