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oorjaverse
Aug 14, 2025
7 min read

The importance of employee training and continued skill development can’t be understated. It has an impact on direct and indirect business outcomes, including productivity, revenue, turnover, and more.

According to Deloitte, organizations with a strong learning culture are 92% more likely to develop new product innovations or novel process improvements and are 52% more productive overall. However, 59% of employees claim they received no workplace training and that the skills required to do their jobs effectively were self-taught.

This highlights a curious trend of employees relying on self-taught skills despite organizations acknowledging the importance of workplace training for professional growth, upskilling, and team improvement. Companies view employee training as an expense rather than an investment. Many organizations must also maintain current output and productivity levels before focusing on learning and development opportunities.

Employee training programs and development opportunities are essential features of successful organizations. They enable them to upskill team members and drive productivity levels. These programs are not a means to fill knowledge gaps; they’re strategic investments in people, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability.

From onboarding new hires to upskilling workers for emerging responsibilities, employee training programs are designed to align individual growth with organizational goals, futureproof organizations, and enable them to remain competitive, innovate, and achieve business outcomes.

What are the different types of employee training programs?

Orientation Training
Onboarding Training
Compliance Training
Product Training
Leadership Training
Technical Training
Quality Assurance (Q/A) Training
Sales Training
Soft-Skills Training
Team Training
Diversity Training
Safety Training
Upskilling
Reskilling

What Is an Employee Training Program?

Employee training programs are systematic L&D initiatives designed by organizations to:

Train employees on how to do their job effective to maximize productivity.
Develop new skills to create skillful employees that can solve technical problems, while helping build new career paths for these employees.
Improve institutional knowledge.
Enhance their interpersonal and leadership skills to cultivate future leaders from within and re-invest in their people.
Meet regulatory and compliance standards.

Employee training programs are essential for supporting employees with the necessary skills, tools, and competencies to perform their roles effectively, adapt to new technologies and methodologies, and contribute positively to an organization’s growth and success.

14 Types of Employee Training Programs

Companies conduct different employee training programs depending on their organization’s size, requirements, skills gaps, industry, needs, and business activities. Here is a list of the most common types of training programs in a modern workplace.

1. Orientation Training

Effective employee orientation training provides basic organizational information that new hires need to prepare for their role in a company. The orientation program benefits employees and employers by educating new hires, setting them up for success in their new roles, addressing any questions they might have, and helping them contribute to the organization immediately.

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Here are the key components of an employee orientation training program:

Standard new hire orientation that provides company knowledge, policies, safety procedures, etc.
Meeting one-on-one with various team leaders and individual contributors to learn about their work, build relationships, and integrate into company culture.
Self-paced online learning programs for job-specific technical training and how to use enterprise software and applications.
Hands-on training for field and factory workers who handle machines and equipment.
In-person group training sessions for role-playing activities and other traditional training methods, great for customer service training, team-building, and client management.
Formal orientation training courses are provided by third-party companies to build soft or hard skills.

2. Onboarding Training

Onboarding training is the process of supporting new hires with the resources and knowledge they need to become productive in the role quickly, like understanding their responsibilities, becoming familiar with company culture, how to use company resources, learning about company products, and more.

While employee orientation is a 1-2 days process, the employee onboarding process is a series of events that take place over a longer time period. The length of employee onboarding depends on the organization and the role and can take anywhere from a week to a month to a full year. Onboarding is responsible for truly integrating an employee within an organization.

By the end of onboarding, an employee must have a clear sense of their responsibilities and goals in the organization. They must also know how to obtain the resources they need to do their jobs and understand how their role contributes to their team’s and company’s objectives.

Here are the core components of employee onboarding programs:

Functional training to provide an overview of the organization’s products and services, clients and customers, and organizational structure.
In-person training sessions are led by team managers and individual experts on your team.
Job shadowing your colleagues.
Training modules and sales training exercises on core company concepts, programs, products, and methods using a corporate LMS.
Facilitated discussions between the new hire and managers to clarify expectations, priorities, and deliverables.
Overview of company goals, organizational chart, and employee KPIs based on the job descriptions.
A 30-60-90 day plan personalized to each employee according to their role, goals, and projects.
Assigning an onboarding buddy for new hires to help them assimilate into social dynamics and company culture.

3. Compliance Training

Compliance training is a workplace training type mandated by legislation, regulation, or policy. It educates employees on the laws and regulations applicable to their job’s function, company’s industry, or worker rights protection laws.

An effective compliance training program helps prevent poor conduct, ensures proper governance, safeguards companies from risks, and protects employees. It minimizes risks to the company and provides a better and safer workplace environment for employees.

Here are examples of compliance-related training courses for government-mandated and industry-specific policies:

Anti-harassment: Anti-harassment compliance training programs administer guidance and measures for responding to incidents like bullying, harassment, and sexual harassment.
Diversity training: Diversity training, also known as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training, emphasizes the strengths of diversity and addresses how to work with people of different ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, ages, mental or physical abilities, etc.
Cybersecurity training: These programs teach staff how to manage sensitive and confidential information efficiently and train them on the strategies, tools, and systems needed to protect personal data.
Business ethics: The ethics & compliance training programs include risk assessment training, methods to encourage whistleblowing, employee accountability structures, and a system for addressing grey areas/conflicts of interest.
OSHA training: OSHA compliance training educates employees on the potential hazards in the workplace, protocols to avoid incidents, how to respond if an incident happens, and teaches workers about their rights.

4. Product training

Product knowledge training educates your employees on your organization’s products or services. This allows employees to do their jobs effectively, such as developing, selling, or marketing a company’s offerings.

Depending on different employee roles, product training focuses on various aspects and has other learning goals. Value-adding product training enables a marketing team to reach the right market and a sales team to answer the critical questions customers are looking for.

Here are a few standard product knowledge training objectives tailored to different roles:

Product training for sales reps: Train the sales team on the product to sell better, improve their customer communication, overcome prospects’ objections, and close deals faster.
Product knowledge training for customer service: Train the support team on the technical aspects of the product – how it works, what parts it consists of, and how to fix it.
Product training for a marketing team: Training on distinctive features, use cases, personas, and benefits of a product to create an effective positioning and promotion strategy.
Product knowledge training for customers: Train your customers on how to use the product and achieve great results.

5. Leadership training

Leadership training develops lower-level employees into future leaders and helps existing leaders maintain their thought leadership and expertise. Leadership development training provide several essential benefits to organizational growth, such as:

Increases employee morale and retention.
Promotes better decision-making.
Build better teams.
Improve leadership styles.
Develops talent from within.

Here are a few essential steps to build your leadership training program:

Define the company’s leadership needs. Where are your leadership gaps?
Identify potential leaders by evaluating employees’ current and potential contribution levels to the organization.
Create a succession plan and handover documentation on all critical skills, knowledge, and advice that current leaders can pass on to future leaders.
Align your leadership development program with organizational goals to ensure the business has the right people in leadership roles that drive outcomes.
Choosing training methods that work for your people. The training process can be handled differently depending on the size and type of the organization, like coaching, mentoring, leader-to-leader development, group-based leadership development, job rotation, job shadowing, etc.
Measure results: Before implementing the training program, determine how the program’s success will be measured. You can measure training effectiveness with simple metrics like course completion rates, use assessments like quizzes, and collect post-training feedback.

6. Technical training

Technical training refers to the ‘hard’ skills required to accomplish a job’s responsibilities and succeed. For example, developers need expertise in certain programming languages.

Modern organizations don’t exist without a software stack. An HCM is critical to HR and people ops success. Sales and marketing teams rely on CRM systems for tracking leads and customer relationships. ERP systems automate dozens of operational tasks, including finance, procurement, supply chain management, and more.

However, while these enterprise applications provide the technology to achieve business outcomes, employees must know how to correctly use these applications and their custom-built workflows to achieve those results.

While organizations expect employees to have a baseline knowledge of using these mission-critical systems, every organization has its processes and governance to follow. This requires dedicated technical training sessions and on-demand performance support that enable employees to maximize the potential of these applications.

Here are a few ways to facilitate technical training to enable employees:

Demonstrate a clear link between technical training and their day-to-day responsibilities and career progression to keep employees motivated and engaged throughout the course.
Showcase examples of how technical training has positively impacted an employee’s real work.
Use subject matter experts to enable effective instructor-led training sessions, pre-recorded videos, and screen recordings, and provide detailed process documentation.
Create standard operating procedures (SOPs) for your company’s processes and workflows.
Enable your employees to learn in the flow of work via in-app guidance like interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, and pop-ups.
Technical training must be available on demand. Provide in-app performance support within your live applications, where employees can use it when and where they need it.

With a digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix, organizations can use a no-code editor to create in-app guided experiences and on-demand performance support that overlay your software applications.