There was a time when businesses relied on academic education systems to hire employees for different roles. After a basic orientation, any graduate would be considered employable and fit for the relevant roles.
Today, with technologies evolving every minute, you can never be sure if an employee who was hired a month ago, would possess the skills that you need for your next big project.
To put it differently, you can never be sure if the academic syllabus is up-to-date enough to expect the latest skills you need for a role today.
Employee Training: The Only Way to Bridge the Gap
Truth is, institutions can’t update their academic curriculum as frequently as the technology and latest job requirements evolve. To remain on the top, companies, businesses, or organizations have no other option but to hire a competent talent and use employee training methodologies to instill the skills that formal education might have missed.
Without an employee training program, most of the workforce would become unemployable within a few years due to evolution in the existing skill or job requirements.
Besides skills, companies also need to educate their new and existing workforce on different governance, risk, and compliance metrics. Hence, every company needs a consistent learning program where they can adopt different training methods for employees to continually acquire the skills as per your changing job requirements, standards, and regulations.
Employee Training is Different from Formal Education
To implement a competent training program and drive excellence in employee performances, companies must obtain uncompromised engagement from the employees. Training delivery platforms promise a reliable channel to drive this engagement by collecting, measuring, analyzing the relevant metrics throughout employee training programs.
A competent training delivery platform ensures that each employee gets as much value from a program tailored as per their personal competence. However, even the best of the programs can’t promise that employees would retain 100% of the training given to them at the time of joining and orientation. Hence, all your new or existing employees need regular refreshers that not only re-train the workforce but also introduce them to the latest updates in the old training modules.
For example, you could create different micro-learning modules with learning resources that help your workforce deal with day-to-day jobs. You could create a general instructional workflow for all your employees, or you create personalized workflows customized according to the strengths and weaknesses of the individual employees.
This is just one simple way to boost employee performances via a different training delivery method. Let’s evaluate three organized training delivery methods that you can adopt in your company or organization.
1. Training Delivery via Employee Performance Measurement Platforms
Tracking training performance and delivery platform data is a good way to enhance training programs. However, as training data becomes more and more diverse, traditional data tracking methods get obsolete. That’s where you can implement a custom data-tracking mechanism and performance analytics to measure relevant aspects, such as:
- Rate of completion
- Time to complete
- Performance in the assessments
The custom data and analytics on these aspects can help you to improve your learning assets by sorting out the less effective ones. Although a majority of training delivery technologies possess some kind of data-tracking capabilities, customized platforms display an even better experience by using real-time information with dynamic analytics.
You could be using any of the following learning and training delivery technologies:
A. Learning Management Systems (LMS): Traditionally, LMS solutions are responsible for hosting and delivering training materials digitally. Such a solution allows you to author, publish, share, and manage training materials in addition to basic data and user tracking capabilities.
B. Learning Experience Platforms (LXP): LXP is nothing but special LMS solutions generalized for corporate training, learning, and development in organizations. These solutions are personalized for corporations to provide a more intuitive and tailored learning experience to the employees.
C. Customized Learning Portals: These are special LXP or LMS customized strictly according to the unique training requirements of an organization. It possesses a customized user-interface, access control, assessment methods, features, dashboards, and integrations that are unique to the training process, skill requirements, just-in-time assistance of an organization.
2. Training Delivery via eLearning Platforms
Most organizations rely on Learning Management Systems and learning portals as training delivery platforms. However, many fail to realize that even these platforms can be used effectively to create intuitive and unified learning experiences, spanning right from the employee onboarding to day-to-day jobs, and skill refresher crash courses.
If you are using a learning portal, ensure that it supports different ways to cater to the learning requirement of different roles, teams, and departments within your organization.
For instance, it must allow you to create dedicated dashboards based on different roles in the organization. This may include simple features like ways to measure learning metrics that are unique to the skills relevant to a specific job role.
Besides, it’s also ideal to have advanced features such as:
- Role-specific learning path.
- Skills that are relevant to the role.
- Leader boards for different skillsets.
- Discussion boards for collaborations.
Such a platform must not only track learning progress effectively but also allow trainers to analyze the effect of learning progress on employee performance. The more detailed you can get with your training data, the better you can map your training programs with employee performance.
Any decent training platform should offer information on learning behaviors such as:
- Rate of course completion
- Scores in the assessments
- Rate of completion for each module/section/chapter/lecture
As much as the data is important for analysis and reporting learning behaviors, a traditional learning portal may not be able to accommodate all the unique sets of data that you may require to generate your unique reports and analytics.
That’s where you must work closely with an eLearning developer and create your own elearning platform tailored specifically to your needs. Having done that, customized platforms demand classroom or online training for employers as well. This is to train the trainers on how to use the platform with all its customized set of features, data, and analytics.
3. Creating an Entire Ecosystem of Interconnected Training Delivery Channels
This is probably the most complex and comprehensive way to offer micro-personalized training to your employees. A learning ecosystem is a collection of different and relevant channels that combine to form a central hub of interconnected, unified systems. It may collectively include individual solutions for different tasks as such as:
- Author learning resources,
- Deliver learning resources,
- Deliver performance stats, and
- Deliver just-in-time job assistance to the right employee at the right time.
Such ecosystems are not just eLearning portals but overall employee development platforms formed by an interconnected web of all the portals, tools, channels, and resources that facilitate personalized learning and support employees in their day-to-day jobs.
The collected in a central hub can be used for devising personalized learning paths and pushing micro-modules just apt for the unique learning and task requirements of an employee. For example, a central hub that interconnects your LMS, career development platform, resource tools, knowledge base, and compliance guidelines of your company.
How to Use Personalized Learning in Your Employee Training Strategy?
Once you have a platform to deliver a personalized learning experience, tailor courses with navigations designed for individual needs. No one likes to waste their time going navigating through something they already know.
An intuitive personalized learning path delivers the right learning materials to the right learner at the right time.
As you work towards devising a competent employee training program for your company, remember that data about individual learners is important for engagement and performance improvements in your employees. Missing on these aspects will only produce poor results; fewer employees would be interested in training, and even lesser employees getting any kind of positive results such as a boost in the overall productivity.