Workplaces are evolving fast in 2025.
Hybrid working. Flexibility. Automation. AI. Mental health. DEI. Skills-based hiring – and that’s just the beginning.
Workplaces today look nothing like they did a decade ago. People and organisations have had to adapt faster than ever before.
So, what does all this mean for the day-to-day?
Put simply, skillsets need to keep up.
The pace of change in the workplace and the wider world demands it.⚡️
Take DEI. Ten, even five years ago, it wasn’t a top priority for most organisations. It only began to take centre stage after the death of George Floyd in 2020.
And look at AI. ChatGPT wasn’t publicly available until 2022. By 2023, it was everywhere -helping with everything from creating art and debugging code to planning holidays and 12-week workouts.
The point?
Things change fast. And the skills we need to succeed are changing just as quickly.
And these are just two examples of how workplaces have evolved in the last few years. There are more.
As workplaces evolve, greater skills are needed. This means employees need to be educated. Trained. Organisations must invest in L&D.
In short, employee training is paramount.
The benefits to both employers and employees are vast. In simple terms, employees get to scale their skillsets and achieve greater earning potential. Employers enjoy greater employee performance and improved retention.
But there’s so much to it than that. Let’s examine the reasons why employee training is important, the benefits and consequences of strong and poor training, how to make training effective, and more.
But first, let’s define what employee training is and why it’s critical to ongoing organisational success.👇
What Is Employee Training?
Employee training is all about helping everyone in your organisation to learn and develop the skills needed to be more effective in their day-to-day activities.
There’s no single, universal way to deliver employee training to suit organisations of all descriptions.
Employee training takes different forms, from e-learning to group workshops, seminars to blended learning and more. This diversity means that organisations can tailor programs to their workplaces, employee characteristics, long-term and short-term goals, and more. 🤔
The Different Types of Employee Training
Employee training falls into different key categories. These are: onboarding, upskilling, reskilling, leadership, and, oftentimes, compliance training. Below is a brief overview of each.
Onboarding training
It is designed to help new employees adjust to their role, company culture, and work environment. The training typically covers essential information, like company policies, procedures, and tools needed for day-to-day tasks. This ensures that employees feel confident, valued, and well-integrated from the very start of their employment, promoting long-term loyalty and sustained success.
Upskilling
Focuses on enhancing an employee’s current skills to optimise performance.
There are distinct types of workforce upskilling, each of which can be tailored to individual workplace environments. The most common are running specialised courses, seminars, or workshops to equip existing employees with better knowledge of a specific subject.
Reskilling
Encourages employees to bolster their existing skills, promoting adaptability, whilst increasing their continued value to an organisation.
Examples of reskilling include learning modern technologies, like Python or SQL, sales strategies training, or instructing everyone how to communicate or problem solve effectively to achieve a desired outcome.
Leadership and compliance
Training helps people develop managerial skills while adhering to any relevant laws and regulations.
Leadership training equips individuals with the skills needed to manage teams, resolve conflicts, and make strategic decisions.
Meanwhile, compliance training educates employees about legal requirements, safety protocols and ethical standards to avoid violations and mitigate risks.
Why Employee Training Is Important
Employee training is much more than just checking off a skills to-do list.
It ensures everyone is equipped with the necessary abilities to perform their duties in their roles within an organisation in the present and the future. 🙌
Organisations that commit to rolling out tailored, thorough, and insightful employee training cultivate an infrastructure that underscores competence, continued evolution and success by honing processes, procedures while promoting agility and achieving short- and long-term goals.
Simply put, training equips employees with the requisite knowledge and skills needed to perform every aspect of their role with confidence and finesse, therefore benefiting the organisation. And this results in an 11% increase in profitability year-on-year.
Then there’s today’s ever-evolving workplace and the effect this has on the talent pool. Good employers invest in their employees, strengthening their existing skills with new ones.
This is especially important in organisations with a strong emphasis on compliance and safety, ensuring that everyone in the organisation is up to speed with the latest industry standards, preventing violations that could come at a significant legal cost.
Employee training will help to reduce human error by promoting performance consistency and setting clear safety expectations and ethical boundaries, whilst improving resilience and crisis management.
Let’s not forget the impact training has on the company culture.
By improving job satisfaction, engagement and retention, organisations can drastically reduce employee turnover, increase their ROI and overall impact. ⭐
The Top Benefits of Employee Training
So, we’ve already outlined a top-line overview of the benefits of training employees; however, to gain greater insight into why organisations should focus a fair proportion of their resources on employee training, let’s look at the specific benefits in a little more detail.
Boosts Employee Performance
The most effective way to boost employee performance is by equipping them with an increasing number of scalable skills. From knowing how to use software tools and AI to communication and negotiation tactics, the greater the training, the greater the knowledge.
This has an additional benefit to employees: increased capability means increased confidence, and the more confident employees are, the better they’ll perform. The result? Better productivity and efficiency enhance critical thinking skills, adaptability, improved communication, collaboration, and much more.
Increases Engagement and Motivation
Invest in employee training and you’ll boost their engagement and motivation. This benefits both individuals and the organisation.
How?
Well, the more competent employees feel in their day-to-day activities, the more motivated they’ll be.
Whether learning or mastering AI or other tech, to honing communication and people skills, to understanding company policies and how they’re applied to day-to-day activities.
Reduces Turnover Rates
Organisations that invest in their employees make them feel valued and appreciated.
This support encourages employees to be loyal to the organisation for longer. And the obvious consequence of this is the growth opportunities, both personally and professionally.
This creates a stronger long-term connection between the employee and the organisation. Employees are more engaged with the organisation’s mission, values, and long-term and short-term objectives, promoting a deeper understanding of their impact they have, while feeling connected to the organisation’s mission and feeling valued. 🤩
All these positive attributes reduce turnover rates, allowing organisations to retain high-value employees, whilst optimising performance and building a strong company culture.
Improves Customer Satisfaction
Employee training has a direct and significant impact on customer satisfaction.
From improved customer service and problem solving and increased productivity to enhanced product or service knowledge, and that all-important customer experience, well-trained employees are competent, and this significantly improves customer satisfaction. 💯
How? Let’s look at this in a little more detail.
Improved communication skills help employees to interact with customers more effectively.
From active listening to solving problems and conflicts, training employees to interact with customers in a more meaningful way, and so much more, demonstrating stellar communication skills can elevate every area of your organisation.
Increases Efficiency
The more adept and efficient employees become in completing areas of their role, the better equipped they are to manage customer interactions and resolve issues. This reduces miscommunication and errors, promoting a better customer experience.
Consistent Service Delivery
Employee training helps to promote consistency across all service delivery areas, ensuring that all employees are aligned with the company standards, mission, brand values, and culture.
Moreover, application of these values in all interdepartmental and external communication builds trust, loyalty, and satisfaction, both internally and externally.
Increased Product/Service Knowledge
Employees who are well-trained on the company’s products, services, and features provide better service levels to customers. This means they’re more likely to receive accurate, detailed, and useful information to make better decisions.
When fully trained to understand the complete product or service suite, employees can provide appropriate recommendations to customers, increasing the likelihood of satisfying their needs while also boosting sales through cross-selling and upselling opportunities. 💸
Improved Teamwork and Collaboration
Team-based training improves interdepartmental collaboration.
This improves communication and relationships, promoting a smoother, more efficient customer experience, leading to greater satisfaction levels.
More than that, employee training promotes a culture of togetherness and alignment in the goal to provide stellar service levels, only achieved when everyone is on the same page.
Drives Revenue Growth
Employee training improves all organisational departments. And this will drive revenue growth. Keep reading below to learn how.
Increased Productivity
Investing in training will help employees to enhance their skill sets, enabling them to perform tasks more efficiently. Employees can get more done in less time, whilst minimising errors. 📈
Improved Customer Satisfaction and Retention
Train employees to provide stellar customer service levels, and you’ll enjoy improved customer satisfaction levels, resulting in brand loyalty and lifetime value.
Stronger Innovation Leading to Competitive Advantage
By training employees to keep up with industry trends, changes in the market and technological advancements, they’ll be better equipped to identify new opportunities, implement new processes, and drive revenue growth.
Promoting Continuous Improvement
Invest in training, upskilling or reskilling employees, and a consequence of this can be a focus on how they can continuously improve their skillsets. This will drive operational efficiencies and, you guessed it, increase revenue.
Enhances Organisational Reputation
Employee training plays a crucial role in enhancing an organisation’s reputation. To discover exactly how, keep reading below.
Improved Service Quality
Fully trained employees deliver enhanced service quality, regardless of their role. From customer-facing roles to support services or product delivery, ensuring that employees fully understand the company’s products, services, and customer needs will improve service quality.
Conflict Resolution and Problem-Solving
Customer service employees trained to manage customer complaints and issues effectively can turn potentially negative experiences into positive ones. Quick resolution and empathy help maintain a positive company image, even when challenges arise.
Expert Employees
Employees who are trained extensively on the organisation’s products or services become fountains of knowledge. Basically, experts. This promotes trust and authority with accurate information, promoting advice and troubleshooting. This expertise bolsters the company’s reputation as a leader. 🏆
The Consequences of Zero or Poor Training
You don’t need to be a genius to see that zero or poor training has a significant impact on organisational performance.
The knock-on effect can have real-world, day-to-day implications that affect organisational performance. Below are examples of this.
Skill Gaps
Let’s start with the most obvious consequence of zero or poor training: skill gaps.
If employers can’t rely on people with sufficient skillsets to complete the tasks placed in front of them, they will be unable to inspire people to work to peak performance.
This dissatisfaction will lead to increased errors and rework, disrupting productivity. Moreover, skills gaps can result in organisations not having the resources needed to complete tasks independently, leading to bottlenecks.
Low Morale
Employees should feel valued, as we’ve already said. However, without feeling like organisations are investing in them, employees simply do not feel valued. This causes low morale, and the consequences of this include decreased productivity, absenteeism, compromised interdepartmental cohesion, decreased performance, and much more that ultimately damages the company’s reputation.
High Employee Turnover
Job dissatisfaction leads to organisations experiencing high employment turnover. And the cause of this can be any number of reasons. From limited career advancement opportunities to burnout from high levels of stress.
This stifles career progression and organisational success. The big problem for organisations is that a high employee turnover rate will, inevitably, become costly, with recruitment going into overdrive.
Increased Errors or Compliance Risks
People make errors when they’re unsure or simply don’t know what they should be doing. And without employee training, how would they know what to do?
Now for something a little more serious: compliance risks. Without employee training, especially for compliance issues, employees will fall foul of pitfalls, and this will inevitably have consequences for the organisation. 👎
How to Make Employee Training Effective
There are several ways that employers can secure the success of any employee training. But only if they touch the five key employee training cornerstones. Keep reading below to uncover what your organisation should be doing to optimise its employee training.
Needs Analysis
A needs analysis is crucial to effective employee training. Not only does it help to identify the skills and knowledge needed to optimise performance, but it can also provide a framework for achieving organisational goals.
Design a considered needs analysis and you’ll align your employee training with organisational priorities, easily identify knowledge and skills gaps, allowing you to create tailored employee training programs, while addressing specific performance issues and efficiently allocating resources.
Personalisation
Personalising employee training is essential to ensuring its effectiveness. Why? People respond better to training tailored to their personal attributes, skillsets, and even personality characteristics.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to employee training. Sure, employees can be grouped together; for instance, IT professionals are likely to share similar character traits, just as the sales or design departments are cut from the same cloth. But, on an individual level, well, people are different.
Personalise employee training as much as possible, and you’ll stand a good chance of building the required knowledge and skillsets for everyone.
Build a Continuous Learning Culture
By embedding an organisational culture that values growth, adaptability and self-improvement through continuous learning, you prime everyone for self-development. Learning shifts from being a one-time event, something that is easily forgotten the day after completion, to an ongoing process.
The benefits of this include signalling that learning is valued, encouraging ongoing skills development, normalising upskilling, empowering employees to take ownership of their own learning and development, while facilitating knowledge sharing, and supporting innovation and agility. ☺️
Leveraging LMS Platforms
By leveraging LMS platforms, like Thirst, organisations can optimise their training by using a centralised, efficient, and scalable way to deliver, manage and track training.
This promotes consistent training delivery, regardless of the nature of the training or your location. This is critical to compliance training, educating employees on company policies or product knowledge, where accuracy and consistency matter.
Better still, all employee training is trackable and measurable. Platforms rich in data sources, like Thirst, provide employees with significant data insights to optimise employee training performance.
Measuring Results
By measuring results, organisations can ensure that their investment in L&D is delivering real value, both for employee performance and overall business outcomes.
Without this, it’s impossible to know whether any employee training is effective, where improvements can be made, or how employee training contributes to the overall strategic goals of the organisation.
Real-World Results – Salesforce
Salesforce developed an AI-driven internal career development platform, Career Connect, which is a clear example of how employee training can reap significant real-world results.
By integrating Career Connect with Slack, Salesforce was successful in assisting employees in identifying personalised career paths and relevant training opportunities.
During a three-month pilot, 74% of users actively participated, 40% enrolled in recommended courses, and over 90% of roles filled internally were discovered via Career Connect.
This initiative resulted in Salesforce filling 50% of roles internally in Q1 2025, demonstrating the effectiveness of personalised training in employee development.
Further Data and Statistics
Investing in employee training will have a profound impact on organisational performance across every department. Just look at the real-world results that Salesforce was able to achieve!
But that’s just one company. One statistic. One single aspect of employee training. Employee training reaps rewards across the board. Let’s look at a handful of standout statistics that further exemplify why you should be investing in employee training.
Increased Productivity
Organisations that invest in employee training invariably achieve a 218% higher income per employee, according to the Association for Talent Development, compared to those that don’t. This yields a 24% higher profit margin.
Improved Learning and Retention
According to a LinkedIn report, 94% of employees said that they would stay with an organisation that invests in their training and development, so training helps to reduce turnover and retain top talent.
More Engagement
Research from Gallup has shown that employees who participate in L&D programs are 39% more likely to remain focused and engaged in their work, and as we all know, this results in improved performance, which only reaps notable organisation-wide benefits.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
Organisations that provide continuous employee training and development achieve a 10% increase in customer satisfaction. And it’s not hard to see why. Better-trained employees can deliver higher service levels to customers.
Improved Innovation
A study conducted by Harvard Business Review found that there’s a strong correlation between employee L&D and a wealth of positive benefits to the organisation. Indeed, organisations with a strong learning culture are 92% more likely to develop innovative products are services.
This culture is especially prevalent in big tech firms like Google, who encourage hours of private project work each week. This is known as ‘the 20% rule’, an informal policy that allows employees to spend up to 20% of their time working on independent projects. The results of this have included AdSense and Gmail.
Final Thoughts
Employee training is the cornerstone of business success.
Invest in employee growth and you’ll improve performance, promote a strong organisational culture, and lay the foundation for long-term prosperity.
Furthermore, a well-structured training program equips employees with the necessary skills to excel in specific and general aspects of their roles, while boosting engagement and motivation. This will increase engagement, enhance performance, while improving customer satisfaction and driving revenue growth.
Not only that, but effective employee training is also a powerful tool in mitigating risk and ensuring that employees are well-versed in company policies, compliance, and industry standards. This helps minimise errors, prevent costly legal issues, and maintain a safe, efficient work environment.
The benefits of employee training extend far beyond the immediate impact of skill enhancement. By investing in their workforce, businesses are not only creating a more competent and confident team but also driving revenue growth and securing a competitive edge in the market. 💰
Investing in employee training isn’t just an option anymore – it’s essential for building a future-ready workforce.
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Thirst is an AI-powered learning platform that helps L&D teams of all sizes boost learner engagement and create experiences tailored to today’s learners.
Take a guided tour today and see Thirst in action.
For more e-learning insights, resources and information, discover the Thirst blog.
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