Employee training plan template

Employee training is a continuous process that starts long before onboarding. Developing training content, assigning it to employees, and following up to ensure it’s finished can be a slog, but the right tools can make it easier. Here’s how to keep track of content, employees, and progress, all in one place.

​

Try the template

​

​

What is an employee training plan template?

An employee training plan template is a pre-structured framework for tracking employee learning, development, and progress. Training plan templates save time by helping HR teams manage onboarding and compliance by providing a reliable process to keep track of content and the employees who engage with it.

​

​

What should an employee training plan template include?

• Training overview: View all employee training programs at a high level, categorizing courses and sessions by factors like intended audience and due dates. This section will help keep training content organized. Different types of training, like new hire onboarding, regulatory compliance training, leadership development can be tracked in this view—whether training materials are provided in-person or as elearning modules.
• Scheduling: Keep all of your training activities organized, assigning training facilitators and team members to modules and courses. Calendar views for employees help them stay on top of their training schedule, with views of upcoming sessions and modules.
• Registration data: Record attendees for sessions in order to keep track of training attendance. For employees running out of time or who are not up to date on their training, you can set up automated reminders by email.
• Course feedback: Employee training modules often finish with a satisfaction survey or rating, which is valuable data for HR teams. A single view of this data can help your team improve programs and plan changes. Detailed survey results can provide helpful metrics on the satisfaction of course content, instructors, and additional detailed feedback.
• Progress tracking: HR teams should have visibility into the progress of the entire organization, sliced and diced by specific training sessions, departments, and employees. Metrics like numbers of trainings attended and overall completion rate can give stakeholders a sense of training targets at a glance. Employees should be able to track their progress and leave feedback visible to HR teams.
• Automated reminders: Employees who have missed mandatory training risk issues with compliance, but automated reminders save time for HR teams by eliminating manual follow-up. Automations can also be set up to help team members hit specific learning objectives or milestones, recommending specific content once certain courses are completed.
• AI interactivity: A template with built-in AI agents can help teams quickly surface insights and answers. Connected through all the complexity on the back end, agents can interact with employees via a conversational interface, responding to queries in natural language.

​

A strong employee training plan template should include different sections to visualize and manage onboarding, training, and compliance. To account for different types of training and different use cases, here are a few recommended components to include in your template:

​

​

The importance of an employee training plan template

Employee training is tied to employee success and regulatory compliance. Unstructured training will incur risks, like inconsistent onboarding, leaving employees out of the know, or missed compliance training, which might land you in hot water, and limited visibility for managers whose success is tied to their teams.

​

A structured employee training template helps HR teams by creating repeatable processes for HR and managers. Structure, organization, and consistency improve alignment, and with the right dashboards, the link between training and performance goals is visible to stakeholders. This allows managers to measure employee performance and have a view into employee onboarding efforts.

​

Templates make it easier to provide clear expectations to employees, whose training will help them grow, boost retention, and improve organizational readiness.

​

​

5 types of employee training plan templates

Employee training isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation. Different templates, customized for different scenarios, can help you create the right program for your team.

​

1. New employee training plan template

A new employee training plan template is designed for onboarding and early ramp-up. New hires should have access to role-specific training, get up to speed on company policies, and learn about the tools and systems they will be using. In smaller companies, new hire training may be an afterthought, but using a free template to create a simple, trackable onboarding process can go a long way in creating a consistent experience for new hires, helping ensure everybody is on the same page.

​

2. Employee cross-training plan template

Cross-training enables employees to build up their skills in other areas, allowing for diversification and extra coverage. This can help reduce single points of failure when somebody is away or leaves, and helps employee career progression. HR teams can develop content around specific skills or training needs to fill in employee knowledge and skill gaps. Templates for cross-training programs can help in organizations where people wear multiple hats, like growing startups, or on teams where people need to ramp-up quickly, like customer success.

​

3. Individual employee training plan template

An individual employee training plan template provides personalized role or career focused learning paths. This is helpful for performance, development, and career progression, and can address anything from skill-gaps to mandatory yearly compliance training. This template may be owned jointly by HR teams, who manage the content on the back end, and the employee, who can access training modules and track progress.

​

4. Annual employee training plan template

Since various compliance training is usually required to be re-upped on an annual basis, a template that accounts for high-level, yearly planning helps HR teams stay on track. Yearly required training usually covers safety, security, harassment in order for organizations to stay with regulatory guidelines. This is especially true in highly regulated industries, where companies could face fines or penalties for falling out of compliance.

​

5. AI enablement employee training plan template

Similar to how cross-training enables employees to “wear a lot of different hats,” so to speak, employee training focused on AI enablement can help them up skill and improve AI literacy. As companies bring on more AI tools to enable automated workflows, a template that tracks tool training and adoption, responsible usage, and role-specific AI applications would be helpful for teams responsible for implementing new tools.

​

​

How to choose the right training plan template

It’s important to choose the right training plan template for your organization in order to provide an effective training experience. When assessing templates, consider factors such as:

​

1. Company size and growth stage: Even a small organization or a startup can benefit from a template laying out an organized training plan. Employees will have a consistent experience, and as the business grows, the right template will scale. Larger companies should have solid training processes in place, with dashboards and data tracking employee adherence, progress, and performance metrics.
2. Training frequency: When choosing a training template, consider how often the training will occur and how the program may evolve over time. One-time training sessions are not one-off experiences and should still be tracked and monitored to assess effectiveness, ideally becoming part of a repeatable workflow for more efficient training processes down the line. For these use cases, look for templates that support basic tracking and reporting without adding unnecessary complexity. Ongoing training, such as yearly compliance training or always-on, self-paced learning modules, requires more scalable templates that can organize and track larger, more complex sets of data, from course content to employee compliance, and continue to perform as your training programs grow.
3. Level of customization needed: The level of personalization an employee training plan template needs will depend on the business. Some templates will work well out of the box, requiring little customization and still provide a seamless employee training experience. Other times, templates can be customized with AI agents that create interfaces and automations to suit your business needs. More often, however, teams want to tailor a template to match their unique processes and workflows. Templates like Airtable’s go a step further, offering built-in AI agents that can generate custom automations, views, and interfaces based on your specific business data.

​

​

Why use our employee training plan template?

Our employee training plan template is designed to be flexible, scalable, and easy to adapt, which gives teams everything they need to build, manage, and track training programs in one place.

​

With customizable interfaces, the Airtable employee training template adapts easily to suit a variety of different needs and program types. HR teams can leverage existing employee data – in a format as simple as a spreadsheet of names or HR systems like Workday to create a single-source-of-truth and get started faster. Different team members and stakeholders can start accessing different parts of the app to get started, enabling real-time collaboration. Small teams, individuals, or the entire organization can access different parts of the app through custom views tailored to their roles or learning paths. With no-code features, building is as simple as prompting the built-in AI agent, or selecting an AI-powered automation. Plus, trying a template for employee training is free.

​

​

Employee development plan template tips

Crafting an employee development plan can be complex, but managing and tracking it doesn’t have to be. Here are a few helpful tips to get you started:

​

• Align training plans to employee training goals: New hires need to ramp-up and gain insider knowledge relevant to their roles, while longer-term employees will be required to take regulatory and compliance training, or may be interested in general up-skilling. Keep track of these different training objectives by logging different employee development resources in a content manager template.
• Review and update regularly: Last year’s AI best practices might be on this year’s blacklist. Or laws and references may require changes to regulatory training. Keeping up to date on changes and updating the content is crucial to keep employees in the green.
• Balance required training with growth opportunities: Training is a must, but helping employees grow can help retention. Providing always-on training and learning modules to help employees keep skills up to date will keep them in your court longer.
• Keep managers in the loop: Managers need to know how their employees are getting on, and providing a simple, easily accessible dashboard to help them monitor employee adherence to mandatory training prevents analytic bottlenecks, where one person might act as a gatekeeper to important data.

​

​

Build an employee training plan with Airtable

This employee training plan template provides HR teams a structured way of organizing training programs, tracking progress, and maintaining consistency across teams—and it’s a great way to get started with Airtable. Airtable’s HR management solution helps HR teams centralize their people data, streamline workflows, and keep teams aligned as your company grows. HR professionals can coordinate the entire employee lifecycle, from hiring to onboarding and continuous development, in a flexible, customizable platform powered by AI.

​

Looking for more templates to help with employee training and development? Explore our full library of HR templates to help you manage employee records, training content, and HR policies with customizable views, automation, and integrations that scale with your organization.