The company’s training plan is an essential link in the adaptation of skills employees to the company’s challenges. It allows the employer to organize the acquisition of skills, in coherence with its strategy, its opportunities and its constraints. The term “training plan” should be obsolete as it has been replaced by the January 2019 Law for the freedom to choose one’s professional future and is now called“Development Plan of skills“.
The profitability approach of each HR activity pushes HR to focus efforts on 2 types of skills:
- Essential skills for professional evolution
- Cross-cutting skills enabling flexibility in resource redeployment.
What are the stages of a training plan?
The training plan consists of 5 steps:
- Define the training objectives
- Learn about the regulatory framework
- Optimize the development program’s design
- Define a training budget
- Measuring the performance
Define the training objectives
The training plan is an operational tool that allows you to develop and adapt your employees' skills to the changes in your organization's business. The definition of the objectives thus passes by a collection of the company's needs in terms of skills. These are then linked to the knowledge, know-how and interpersonal skills of the employees. This cross-referencing of the existing situation with the needs gives rise to an analysis that aims to define the positions, profiles and individuals that require training.
Learn about the regulatory framework
The development plan of skills is a component of professional training. As such, it is governed by certain legal obligations.
What are the employer's training obligations?
The company must comply with several guidelines:
- Train every employee every 6 years at a minimum(law of March 5, 2014).
- Adapting the training provided to the job and maintaining the employability of employees.
- Set up collective bargaining and social dialogue on the subject of professional training (for companies with more than 300 employees), within the framework of the Gestion Prévisionnelle des Emplois et des skills.
- Every two years, conduct a professional interview with each employee in order to discuss career development.
- Submit the training plan to the CSE every year as part of the consultation on the company's social policy.
Optimize the development program’s design
There are different training management software, or Strategic Workforce Planning. Their purpose is to align your strategic needs in terms of development of skills with the training requests made by your employees.
Here are the main functionalities of the tools at your disposal:
- A “training request” module : management of individual or group training requests, integration with professional interview campaigns, management of the training catalog, request validation workflows, integration into the forecast plan, decision support indicators.
- A module dedicated to the provisional training plan: automatic creation of the training plan from validated requests, filters by establishments, fields, managers, etc.
- A module for monitoring costs, individual or collective, dashboards with gross/net forecasts and comparisons with allocated budgets.
- A module for planning sessions : creation of sessions, management of registrations, indicators for monitoring the progress of sessions.
- Amodule that allows you to monitor the implementation of the training plan: real-time progress of the plan, budget monitoring, management of requests for reimbursement until reimbursement, evaluations of the achievement of objectives and the quality of the training courses attended.
Develop a training budget
The training landscape is undergoing a major transformation: inflation of content and ease of access, the arrival of the Blaockchain in the transparency and readability of certifications in particular. According to the topformation barometer, the budget is the second biggest obstacle for HR teams (48% find it insufficient). HR development teams are also on a new path that combines 2 aspects:
- Take into account the economic opportunities of free content that 71% of employees now use
- Renovate their development offering to keep the company on track at skills .
We recommend that you read our complete page on the subject:“Training budget: the best levers for optimization“.
Measuring the performance of the training plan
Like any strategic project of the company, the training plan must be evaluated. Performance measurement is based on the evaluation of individual and collective skills levels, whether in the form of tests, interviews or performance against the development plan objectives. Several customized dashboards will show the evolution of the levels of skills : skills at risk, skills emerging for example.
The assessment of the training plan, carried out each year, makes it possible to adjust the design and deployment method in subsequent years if necessary.
