Organizations know that trained employees are happier, stay in their jobs longer, and are more productive. If you are new to building employee training and employee onboarding programs or are looking to expand the courses you offer, here is the start of a list of employee training topics to consider including in your programs.
Key takeaways
- Invest in soft skills – Soft skills, such as communication, leadership, time management, conflict resolution, and ethical decision-making, are essential to building a collaborative, resilient, and high-performing workforce.
- Include technical and creative competencies – Training isn’t limited to hard skills. Creative and technical topics—ranging from improv, storytelling, photography, and cooking, to engaging formats like hackathons, Lego challenges, and role-playing—can enhance creativity, engagement, and learning retention.
- Offer role-specific, in-demand training: Invest in upskilling tailored to different functions: for leaders/managers: management, performance oversight, coaching, decision-making; in IT/engineering: programming languages, cloud computing, cybersecurity; for sales and customer-facing teams: communication, customer service, account management.
- Use a mix of learning formats – A blend of formal soft-skill sessions, hands-on technical workshops, creative labs, interactive challenges, and fun courses caters to diverse learning styles and job roles.
- Adopt a strategic training design approach – Analyze existing materials (documents, wikis) to help guide you on the courses to offer.
Soft skills training for employees
In today’s fast-paced business environment, the importance of soft skills cannot be overstated. While technical expertise and hard skills are crucial, it is the mastery of soft skills that often distinguishes high-performing teams and successful leaders.
Investing in soft skills training for employees not only enhances individual performance but also fosters a more collaborative, innovative, and productive workplace culture. Here are employee development training topics that are focused on soft skills training that will empower your workforce with the skills they need to thrive in any situation.
CommunicationHone writing, presentation, personal interaction, and listening skills. | Leadership DevelopmentLearn the conditions, techniques, and activities which facilitate the development of leaders. |
Conflict ResolutionLearn strategies to build stronger relationships and minimize negativity during conflicts. | Performance ManagementDiscover processes and systems for managing the performance of individuals, teams and organizations. |
CoachingLearn how to provide employees with advice and guidance to develop skills, performance and career. | Time ManagementLearn how to spend more time working toward your high-value goals. |
ManagementLearn how to carry out the planning function of management. | Decision MakingLearn effective techniques and tools on decision making and problem solving. |
Stress ManagementLearn how to identify stressors, manage and cope with stressful situations and create a plan to reduce or eliminate them. | Problem SolvingLearn how to identify problem, apply root cause analysis, develop and evaluate solutions. |
Project ManagementLearn how to create a project plan, manage stakeholders and relationships, organize teams, develop a project charter, and build a business case for a project. | EthicsLearn about frameworks for identifying and resolving ethical dilemmas and challenges. |
Change ManagementDevelop skills and discover strategies and techniques for managing workplace change. | TeamworkLearn about different workplace behaviours, their effects and how to encourage people to work with each other and get along well. |
Presentation SkillsDiscover how to prepare presentations and visual aids, be interesting, persuasive, and communicate key messages. | Crisis ManagementLearn how to analyze situations leading to a crisis, evaluate a crisis response, analyze an organization’s public communications and conduct an analysis to mitigate future crises. |
Interpersonal CommunicationLearn about communicating with different cultures, how to interpret verbal and nonverbal messages accurately and effectively and how to listen effectively. | Workplace HarassmentIncrease employees’ understanding of what constitutes harassments, including sexual harassment, and its management and prevention. |
Sales CoachingGet techniques on how to improve the relationship between sales professionals and their clients, increase sales performance and close rates. | Customer ServiceLearn how to understand customers’ needs, how to effectively communicate the customers and strategies to develop solutions to meet their needs. |
Active ListeningLearn how to attentively listen to a speaker, understand what they’re saying, respond and reflect on what’s being said, and retain the information for later. | MentoringGet the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to build an effective and safe mentoring relationship using culturally appropriate language and tools. |
Influence and PersuasionGet techniques for improving your ability to influence and motivate others to buy products, services, and ideas. | Unconscious biasGet more awareness of the mental shortcuts on race, gender and other factors that lead to judgments about people’s talents or character,. |
Technical employee training topics
In today’s increasingly complex and regulated business landscape, technical training for employees is essential to ensure that your organization remains compliant, secure, and efficient.
Whether it’s adhering to industry-specific rules, safeguarding against cybersecurity threats, or maintaining the highest standards of quality and safety, technical training empowers your workforce with the knowledge and skills they need to navigate these critical areas.
Here are employee development training topics that build the expertise required to protect your organization and maintain operational excellence.
Regulatory ComplianceLearn how to implement operational compliance compared to regulations and standards and how to minimize health and business risks. |
CybersecurityLearn about cybersecurity theory and basic techniques for optimizing security on personal computers and networks. |
Industry Rules and RegulationsLearn how to abide to specific industry rules that your organization must abide to in order to avoid fines and reputational damage. |
Quality and Quality ControlDiscover statistical quality control concepts and how to apply these to the design and management of quality control processes. |
Health & Safety TrainingThis type of training includes things like handling hazardous materials, fire drills, evacuation plans, and workplace violence procedures. |
Food Safety TrainingLearn about safe handling of food and local regulations. |
Coding and ProgrammingLearn how to design, code, and test software. |
General and Content WritingLearn how to write for your target audience and communicate effectively. |
Data AnalysisLearn about data collection, data visualization, probability and statistics, data structures and algorithms, and how to extract insights from data. |
Social Media ManagementLearn how to create effective social media posts, how to create a strong brand and how to manage social media interactions. |
Products and ServicesLearn about the features and benefits of your organization’s product lines and services. This should also include competitive analysis. |
Franchise ManagementLearn how to start and manage a franchise. Also learn about how to recruit, onboard and manage new franchisees. |
Agile MethodologiesLearn about planning and managing Agile projects using methodologies such as scrum, and lean project management methodologies. |
Data ScienceExplore topics like how to use Python for data analysis, statistics, regression and supervised machine learning. |
AILearn about prompt engineering for generative AI, how to use AI to automate tasks, enhance decision-making and personalize customer experiences. |
Cloud Computing & InfrastructureExplore topics such as how to provision, optimize, and secure AWS, Azure, Google Cloud environments. |
Fun training courses
Employee training doesn’t always have to be serious to be effective. Fun training courses can play a vital role in building skills, fostering teamwork, and boosting morale within your organization.
By engaging employees in creative and enjoyable activities, such as improv or cooking, you can help them develop important skills like public speaking, quick thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration—all while reinforcing a positive workplace culture.
Here are some ideas for fun employee training topics that build skills, teamwork and morale.
ImprovImprove public speaking, creativity, quick thinking, problem-solving and teamwork. | CookingImprove creativity, problem-solving and teamwork. |
PhotographyImprove observation skills, creativity, design composition and team building. | Arts and CraftsOffer a therapeutic break and improve creativity and team cohesion. |
StorytellingImprove listening, creativity and communication skills. | Role-playingMake this fun and stretch communication skills by teaching people to communicate with people they don’t normally interact with. |
Lego ChallengeFoster creativity, engineering thinking, and problem-solving by challenging employees to build structures with constraints. | HackathonsAsk participants to solve a complex problem quickly and encourage problem-solving, teamwork and communication. |
Most in-demand skills by function
Business*Management | Finance/Accounting*Management | Engineering*JavaScript |
Information Technology (IT)*Management | Marketing*Social media | Project & Program Management*Management |
Sales*Customer service | Trainers**Presentation skills | Instructional designers***Learning models |
Cybersecurity*Network and system administration | Human Resources (HR)Communication |
* LinkedIn including 2023 Workplace Learning Report
**Australian Skills Quality Authority
*** Indeed
How to quickly build in-house training
We at LearnExperts have developed a tool called LEAi, which allows HR, marketing, documentation, training and other teams to take documents, presentations, and wikis already existing in the organization and transforms them into content for knowledge-sharing, training and sales enablement. The content created by LEAi can be used for all sorts of employee training topics, applications and resources including internal training sessions, step-by-step guides, eLearning, knowledge base articles, presentations, webinars, videos and more.
Features our clients love include:
- Course content writer – Import content from your subject matter experts (SME), like documents, presentations, webpages and wikis, and LEAi writes the learning objectives and foundational content for you in seconds.
- LearnAdvisor – This feature continuously looks for learning best practices that aren’t being followed, provides you suggestions on how to improve it, and offers to change it for you automatically.
- Content translator – Quickly translate course content with AI suggestions and your own input. LEAi ensures consistent, up-to-date translations across your course.
- Microlearning creator LEAi does the hard work of breaking large sections of content into smaller courses, making it easier for learners to take and understand.
- Test question generator – LEAi automatically generates the assessment questions that test whether your learners grasp the most important aspects of your course.
- Course updater – LEAi intelligently updates changes to your courses in seconds so that you can eliminate the mundane task of updating individual courses.
If you’re an overworked HR professional looking for a tool to enhance your employee training or L&D programs, allowing you to maximize revenues and boost employee development, please drop us a note!
