How to Develop a Training Plan for Hourly Staff

Your hourly employees may be eager to learn the job.

Different types of employees need different training. Employees who work on salary are generally presumed to stick around for a long period of time, whereas employees who work for an hourly wage are not thought to be as long-term oriented. Accordingly, you should develop different training plans for salaried and hourly staff. To develop a training plan for your hourly staff, you need to understand the factors that differentiate them from salaried staff.

Things You'll Need

• Computer
• Word processing software

Instructions

1. Review your company's objectives. Look for this information in the filing cabinet or folder where company policies are stored, or ask your boss if you don't know where it is. Read with a pen in hand, and underline the parts of the objective sheet that relate to the duties of hourly staff. For example, underline all sections relating to productivity or working hours requirements for hourly staff.

2. Read the job descriptions for hourly employees. Look for the contracts that all hourly employees have to sign when they agree to take on the job. Read over the part of the contract that specifies what the employees need to do as part of their jobs.

3. Make a list of skills that employees need to possess in order to perform the duties listed in their contracts. Also include skills that employees might not need to perform contractual duties, but that will come in handy when in certain situations on the job. For example, if you are developing a training plan for cashiers, list skills like "cash register operation," "counting," and "inventory management."

4. Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper, and use this line to separate your list of job skills into ones that can be taught in a one- to two-week training program and ones that need to be independently learned. Make a note to include training for skills in the former category in your training program.

5. Write a daily itinerary. Set aside a number of days for policy training and a number of days for skills training. Make sure that you set aside enough days to read company policies and industry laws and regulations out loud. If you do not know how many days will be required to provide training for each skill, ask a coworker who has trained new employees on that skill before. Type your itinerary up on your computer -- in any word processing program -- so that you can easily modify and edit it.

6. Break down the skills training components of your itinerary into sub-sections. If you have a day dedicated to a more than one type of skill training training, break that day down into sections. If are teaching just one skill per day, split the day up into sections based on the subsets of that skill, keeping in mind that any skill that takes a day to learn can probably be broken down into smaller sections.

7. Write a final evaluation for your hourly staff members. Make this test as comprehensive as possible; make sure it covers information on all the basic categories of policies and skills related to the employees' jobs. Write multiple choice questions to test trainees' grasp of basic facts, and short answer questions to get a sense of their own thinking on the material. Because hourly staff are typically not as permanent as salaried staff, you can't waste too much time training them, so make sure the test covers only the essential material the employees need to know.

References

• Microsoft Office: Developing Your Employee Training Program