Mentorship Matters: How Peer Training Can Reduce Turnover in Industrial Roles

One warehouse employee training two other employees

Peer training involves teammates sharing their knowledge and abilities to support learning new skills, concepts, or processes. The participants are teachers and students in activities such as job shadowing.

Peer training in industrial roles strengthens trust, collaboration, and employee engagement. Providing guidance and support helps reduce turnover and improve workforce stability.

Importance of Peer Training in Industrial Roles

Peer training in industrial roles is important for many reasons:

  • Peer-to-peer interactions support camaraderie, respect, and relationship-building.
  • Offering a safe space for teams to share ideas and opinions encourages open communication, collaboration, and problem-solving.
  • Employees gain diverse perspectives on a subject.
  • Building onto existing knowledge supports critical thinking.
  • All teammates contribute to the learning process.
  • Teams stay engaged and productive.
  • Creativity and innovation increase.

Benefits of Peer Training in Industrial Roles

Peer training in industrial roles provides diverse benefits:

  • Exposure to different perspectives strengthens diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
  • Peer-to-peer connections support a culture of learning.
  • Team learning strengthens knowledge retention and skill application.
  • Peers openly give, receive, and implement feedback for performance improvement.
  • Teams actively participate in professional development.
  • Teammates experience greater motivation, job satisfaction, and morale.
  • Feeling valued, respected, and appreciated reduces industrial role turnover.
  • Peer-based learning lowers training costs.
  • Closing workforce skill gaps increases revenue generation and business growth.

Steps to Implement Peer Training in Industrial Roles

These steps can help you implement peer training in industrial roles:

Determine your goals

Decide what you want your peer training outcomes to look like. Create specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound (SMART) goals.

Find mentors and mentees

Ask your industrial team who would like to provide and receive peer training. Gather information about the participants’ career goals and backgrounds to pair accordingly.

Schedule a mentor training session

Facilitate training to help mentors develop their leadership skills. Remind the mentors to engage with their mentees through clear, respectful communication and actionable feedback.

Pair the participants

Use your goals and the participants’ information to pair each mentor with a mentee. For instance, to reduce turnover, you can pair mentees who expressed interest in career growth with mentors who can provide guidance and support.

Track progress

Measure the success of your peer training program to ensure it reaches your goals. For instance, consider conducting an exit survey to gather participant data. Also, measure employee turnover rates before, during, and after the peer training program to determine the difference mentorship makes.

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