Instructor-led training is any kind of learning that happens in a classroom setting. There could be one or more instructors who help learners acquire new skills or knowledge through lecturers, presentation and discussions.

The greatest benefit of classroom training is the human dynamics that it facilitates. Face-to-face interactions with the instructor and real-time discussions are powerful ways to learn. Having an expert answer questions instantly and validate learners’ understanding of the subject are key aspects of ILTs. Instructor-led training is most suitable for soft skills training such as communication skills or sales skills.

However, it does have its own limitations. Sales conferences or training programs are usually organized off-site. Coordinating and bringing sales people from different geographical regions to the conference is an expensive affair, not to speak of the opportunity loss when the sales people are off the field.

Sales managers tend to jam all of the year’s learning into this one single event. Too much content is overwhelming to anybody. It is said that almost 60 to 90 percent of the skills that are acquired by salespeople during a training program are lost by the end of 30 days. Also, training is largely dependent on the personality of the instructor and his capability in holding the audience’s attention. Hence, there is likely to be no consistency in the quality of the training program.

There is usually no reinforcement strategy wherein the sales people have a refresher course or review program on what has been taught during the instructor-led training program. One way to make up for the shortcomings of an instructor-led training program is to supplement it with online training or eLearning and making it available on-demand for sales people.

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L&D professionals are constantly challenged with the dynamic organizational environment. The needs and requirements of learners keep changing and with that the method of facilitating knowledge transfer needs to change accordingly. They have to make a conscious effort to develop a learning culture in the organization. How can they achieve this?

Enable learning as an opportunity for personal development: With the shift from training to learning the focus has shifted from the trainer to the learner. We no longer emphasize on what the trainer needs to teach but focus on what the learner needs to learn. Thus L&D professionals need to drive home the point that their efforts are geared towards providing employees opportunities to enhance their skills which in turn help them grow professionally and personally. They take eLearning courses not because the L&D department has directed them to do so, but because they see it as a way forward towards personal growth and development.

Provide learning communities and platforms: L&D professionals can create virtual learning communities within the organization to encourage peer-to-peer interaction and learning. They can reward and recognize employees who contribute to the learning community and facilitate learning relationships within the organization. There are many instances in the corporate world how organizations have benefited from such informal learning initiatives.

Include learning goals as a part of the job description: Many organizations include completing stipulated courses as a part of the employee induction program. Taking this a bit further, L&D managers can include short-term and long-term learning goals as a part of the job description of the employee. This sets clear cut goals for the employees and steers him towards a learning mindset.

Encourage innovative ideas and efforts: Employees can improvise on existing systems or methods in an organization. Such attempts even if not significant should be encouraged as you never know when this might lead to a bigger discovery or break-through. It also encourages others in the team to follow suit and make their own set of discoveries which is beneficial for an organization to perform better.

Learning is an ongoing process – be it professionally or personally. However, individuals vary in their perceptions about learning and that poses a challenge to L&D professionals and organizations who wish to foster a learning culture within their organization. However, if learning is more collaborative where employees at all levels become co-learners, there may be less resistance and more acceptance to learning.

A good eLearning course should market itself. It should be aligned with the business goal, it should be instructionally sound and enhance the learning experience. However, the rate of drop-outs among those who take up eLearning courses is very high. The reasons typically could be lack of personal motivation, poor instructional design of the course, conflicts between work and personal commitments and so on. If we need to overcome these barriers, the instructional material should be tailored in such a manner that the learner is motivated to complete the course.

Poorly-designed eLearning courseware will have no takers and might seriously affect your objectives of eLearning. The only way to ensure that this does not happen is to make sure that whatever courses you offer are well-designed. If you don’t have the expertise in house for robust courseware design and development, you could partner with a learning solutions organization to design and develop your eLearning courses. That way while you have control over the content of the courses, you will have the expertise of an eLearning courseware developer to repurpose the content in a manner that appeals to the learners.

Another major factor for failure of eLearning programs is lack of encouragement by the management. The completion of courses depends on reinforcement given for training by managers. If courses are not tracked and employees who have completed the course are not given due recognition, employees may not be motivated to take up the courses. However, managers are already overburdened with responsibilities and it is often not practical for them to oversee or maintain a Learning Management System where eLearning courses are hosted.

You could even check with the organization that is developing eLearning courses if they can partner with you to strategize and implement your marketing initiatives. This way, you have a package in which both aspects critical to your success are addressed in one go. This is to say that the responsibility of developing quality eLearning courseware and marketing the same among your employees will be taken up by the eLearning service provider. They could in fact, market, manage and monitor your eLearning initiative together with managing of the learner enrollment, evaluation and final assessment. With the responsibility of administrating eLearning off your shoulders, you could devote your time to your core functionalities.

Finally, before going all out in trying to create a big bang about our proposed launch, we need to remember that it’s not the glitz and glitter of marketing alone that sells. Our communication, marketing and promotion activities will yield the highest results if they demonstrate the benefits of eLearning clearly to all the stakeholders including the learners.

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Companies are spending millions to deploy training solutions through an enterprise-wide LMS. Once that is done, all trainings are migrated to it and new trainings added. One would imagine that having this huge library of trainings is enough to take care of any employee’s training needs in order to improve their performance on the job. But wait. Despite the best of intentions, the results are almost invariably a bit disappointing.

Here are a few possible reasons why this could be so:

1. Lack of an awareness-building initiative

How many organizations invest in marketing and promoting their training portal and trainings across their organization? The general attitude is ‘we built it, now let them come to it’. Deploying or making training solutions is no guarantee that learners will come there and take training and participate in learning. Unless, there is a sound promotional campaign that builds awareness among learners on the benefits of using the training portal and accessing trainings.

2. Disorganized trainings

It is important to ensure that trainings are easy to locate. Some users like to go through the site systematically to see what all it offers. Yet others come in there only to search for a specific training, locate it in a few seconds and be done with it. In either case, a clear cut any of organizing trainings is required, so that learners don’t waste time trying to locate trainings of their choice.

3. Absence of mentoring support

It is one thing to make all kinds of trainings available. It is another thing to step in as a mentor and provide ongoing support, encouragement, and suggestions to learners to keep their engagement high. Because of the impersonal nature of the medium (online, with no face-to-face interactions), it is all the more important to stay in touch with learners and be available to them. It is not enough to just provide resources – to drive completion and exploration of various things on offer, some kind of ongoing mentoring and support is required.

4. Lack of ongoing moderation

Social learning, group learning, collaborative learning. You must be familiar with these buzzwords. Just providing avenues for this kind of learning is not enough. What you do need is to drive the adoption of these kinds of channels of learning. This involves much more than merely providing trainings and expecting learners to initiate discussions and get started with the collaborative aspects of learning. Some form of moderation and direction will help.

5. Lack of just-in-time training

With mounting time pressures, your employees need information and training at their fingertips NOW. They should have access to training on-demand. This aspect cannot be overemphasized.

I will explore more reasons in the next blog on this topic. In the meanwhile, I’d love to hear from you on what you think are the biggest challenges organizations face in providing comprehensive, feasible and relevant training solutions.

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Mobile Learning has become a viable learning medium in recent times. However, it is neither a panacea for all ills nor an alternative for classroom training or eLearning. In fact, mLearning can complement classroom training and eLearning very well. Here are a few recommendations to get started with mobile learning.

Choose your audience carefully: When we talk about mobile learning, typically, we are talking about learners who are tech-savvy and comfortable using the latest gadgets. You need to ensure that they possess devices that are suitable for mLearning. For example, in an organization, if there are not many employees who use such devices, there is no point in planning a mobile learning initiative.

Exercise caution while choosing the content: Content for mobile learning has to be very focused and interesting. It needs to be for a short duration. For example: a module on the correct posture for lifting weights can be short as well as interesting for learners.

Pay attention to the interactivities planned: Your interface should be easy and intuitive. There cannot be too many interactivities in mLearning because in some devices, flash-based content may not play.

Engage a specialist: If you do not have adequate resources to initiate mLearning in your organization, it is advisable that you engage a specialist who can help you avoid a lot of technical headaches.

It is a fact that there are more users of mobile phones than users of computers. Hence, mobiles can be a powerful medium of learning. Users who do not have access to computers at home could be provided supplementary material via mobiles. However, it can never be a standalone learning medium. It needs to be supplemented by learning through other formats such as through computers.

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eLearning has gained a lot of importance in the last few years and organizations have recognized the need to make learning available easily for employees. There are increasing attempts to supplement classroom training with online training as they are recognized as performance enablers. The easiest option for organizations to implement eLearning is to utilize some of the off-the-shelf courses available in the market. However, these decisions have to be taken after a great deal of thought because off-the-shelf courses can’t meet every training need.

Imagine an organization that invests in a huge library of catalogue courses. The training manager perhaps will send out a standard email to employees informing them of the courses available, giving them the access details. A few self-driven employees might decide to check it out but most employees might choose to ignore it. The few employees who manage to access the catalogue courses library may find themselves disoriented by the information overload and might end up being intimidated.

Only the most determined and driven employee might take the initiative and take up the courses in the virtual library. All said and done, employees have to deal with their own daily pressures and targets that they may not have the time to browse through the available courses and identify what best suits them. The result being that most employees might just not find the time for it and be fully occupied with their pressing work-related deadlines.

This cookie cutter approach to implementing eLearning may not be suitable to all organizations because every organization is different with varied training needs. Employees also differ in terms of their motivational levels, expectations and training perceptions. If learning material is designed in the organizational context, using jargon and lingo employees are familiar with is better understood and assimilated by the learners.

That said, off-the-shelf trainings may be suitable for certain standardized technical know-how (such as ISO 9001, Android OS, .NET technology and so on), but might not be viable when it comes to addressing specific needs of an organization. So how far can standard courseware be effective in training individuals in a particular organization? Please share your views and experiences.

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Having eLearning programs and initiatives in the organization is commendable. However, it is not adequate. To give the initiative its logical ending, you need to market it within the organization. Given below are three good reasons why trainers or L&D heads should make an effort to market eLearning programs within their organizations.

eLearning courses are meant for your employees: However, they can’t register for these courses unless they hear about them and learn about the benefits that these courses offer. The decision to try a new product starts with awareness followed by a study of its benefits. The same thing is true with respect to an eLearning course, especially if your organization is new to eLearning. Employees need to be made aware of the benefits it offers them. Many organizations launch eLearning initiatives spending considerable amount of money but have no takers among their employees. More often than not, it is because organizations failed to increase awareness of these eLearning programs through promotions and marketing efforts. Organizations that consciously used communication, promotion and marketing campaign within the organization were more successful in implementing their eLearning programs by attracting and retaining learners.

You need to see visible results: The eLearning initiative is taken to cater to a particular need. There is an end objective, based on which the training program is designed. Having spent a lot of energy, effort and thought to develop the eLearning solutions, it would be futile to allow it to fizzle out before achieving the desired objective. A consistent message has to be sent out on an ongoing basis so that employees are aware of how eLearning courses can contribute to their professional development and growth in the company. This is the only way of getting them to adopt eLearning and thereby let the organization experience the results of deploying eLearning.

You have sunk training dollars into your eLearning courses: And need to demonstrate ROI to executive management and decision makers such as a CLO or CEO. Having invested in the initiative, they will be constantly monitoring the investment and its impact on productivity. And as with any other investment option, hard metrics need to be employed for this purpose. The cost of providing the benefits of the program divided by the program costs is the usual way to calculate the ROI. And if your employees don’t benefit from the eLearning because they are not even aware of the benefits, it’s a waste of training dollars. This is where marketing eLearning can make all the difference in helping drive better ROI.

To summarize, internal marketing is absolute key to make your eLearning program a success. It is essential to create the awareness regarding the eLearning program among the employees and to impress upon them its benefits. This will encourage them to enroll for the program and benefit from it. It will also ensure that the investment in the training program has the desired results in terms of improved employee productivity and better ROI.

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Product trainings are important for every employee who has any form of interaction with customers. It could be sales personnel, customer service personnel or service staff. Knowledge of the products helps them not just to win over the customers but to retain them as well. Hence companies need to invest their time and money to conduct periodic product trainings.

It is not without reason that successful organizations have invested heavily into eLearning-based product training.

eLearning is the most economical way to distribute standard and consistent product training to the entire sales force enterprise wide. For example, when a new product is launched globally and the huge sales force needs to be trained about its features, it involves a lot of logistical planning to organize physical training programs. However, eLearning for product training doesn’t involve these kind of logistical problems. It can be organized to ensure global, multicultural reach with a consistent message to all the relevant employees.

eLearning can be designed to suit the target audiences. Ideally, product training for service personnel and sales personnel should be different. There may be some overlap with respect to the content but the approach towards training essentially needs to be different. eLearning provides the flexibility to position the product accurately depending on the target learners. This is not to say that such a differentiation is not possible in traditional instructional-led training but it becomes easier to create different modules in an eLearning course. There would be common learning objects which would be the same but eLearning provides the flexibility to reuse the learning objects to suit different target audiences.

There are times when organizations launch a new product and need to disseminate information about the product to its employees in multi-locations simultaneously. eLearning courseware comes handy in such a scenario. Moreover, product features can be presented in a manner that is easy to recall using GUI tools, videos or animations.

The best part of eLearning is that it can also be used as a powerful way to prepare a learner for hands on sessions. You can in fact use eLearning as a prerequisite to the hands on session. When participants come into the physical hand-on training session, they come with some basic knowledge which can be further developed during the face-to-face interaction with experts. Thus, the time of the experts can be qualitatively used to address more complex issues.

In short, an integrated product training together with product knowledge and selling skills can be blended into an eLearning training program. What makes eLearning more effective is that it can be tailored to suit the needs of the organization and its various geographical locations where it is present.

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Design strategies for product training can be multifold depending on the nature of the product and the target audience. For example, the learning strategy for a software product would be different from the strategy needed to train on a piece of equipment or an electronic gadget. Similarly, the strategy cannot be the same for a sales person selling a product and the end-user who is actually going to be using the product.

Nevertheless, there are some basic design strategies that can serve as guidelines for product training. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Workshops/ Hands on sessions: The best way to get a learner to familiarize himself with a product is through workshops which are hands-on where a learner can actually get to use the product. However, when you need to train a large group of employees spread across different regions on using a piece of equipment, you could use an alternative strategy. You could use online training options which could be followed up with hands-on or on-the-job training.

Demonstrations/ Videos: Online demonstrations of products can be very powerful means to demonstrate how the product needs to be operated. Demos are effective to showcase the products in action. If using an online training method, videos of the demonstrations can be embedded into the eLearning courseware.

Graphics: When it is not possible to show a product physically, the best way to represent it is through graphics. In fact, in certain situations, a 3D model of a product can be visually demonstrated more clearly using graphics so that its functionality is better understood.

Job Aids: As the name indicates, these could consist of any information that helps the user do his job better. It could be a checklist for operating machine or simple dos and don’ts while using a product.

Case-based learning: A scenarios can be used to explain product features or functions. Content that is otherwise theoretical and boring could be made more interesting to the learner by using case-based scenarios. Troubleshooting of problems could also be explained in a similar manner with relevant examples.

Testimonials: Customer testimonials about the benefits of a product can be used as an effective means to highlight the main features of a product.

Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS): Barry Raybould in 1991 defined EPSS as a computer-based system that improves worker productivity by providing on-the-job access to integrated information, advice, and learning experiences. These are ideal for training that requires needing access to a huge amount of information. Think of the kind of information that dealers or distributers of spare parts for automobiles need and you will see how an electronic performance support system provides an optimal solution.

eLearning or online learning can be effectively used for product training purposes. Instructor-led training for products may have certain advantages but if they are supplemented with online training with the design strategies mentioned above, it surely will make the course very learner-centric and user-friendly.

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Your organization has decided to go in for a new software application. This new application is going to make things easier by speeding up processes and systems. It is also going to bring great added value to your customers. But before anything else, you will need to train your employees on how to use this new software application. What would be the best way to do it?

Organizations today are increasingly using online training solutions to impart training for software applications. There are many advantages of choosing online training solutions for software applications. Let’s take a look at a few of the reasons.

• 1) An experienced user need not be a good teacher: I may be an expert in using a particular software application but I may not have the requisite skills to teach the same. With online training it is possible to provide uniform training meeting high standards across the organization.
• 2) Hands-on exposure: Learners get to learn the application while using it. Each individual prefers to learn at his own pace and method. With step-by-step course material, he will be able to use and experiment with the application at his own convenience.
• 3) Best for technical training: Online training is especially beneficial for technical training as visual learning aids and graphics facilitate easy learning.
• 4) Cost-effective: Providing online training is very cost-effective as training managers need not coordinate travel arrangements or individual schedules. It is much easier to implement an online training program across different geographic regions.
• 5) Training on newer versions of the software is faster: Organizations may be already using an older version of the software and when a new version is launched, it becomes easier to provide online training with respect to the new features of the latest version and its benefits. This can be done by having an online course just for highlighting the new features. It also becomes easier to modify the older courses by incorporating changes if the course is developed as eLearning courseware.
• 6) Easy reference: To have the program online or on the company intranet serves as easy reference for the employees or learners whenever they have a problem and need to look for a solution.
• 7) Multiple formats: Online training can be imparted in many ways. Users can be given options of using the company intranet or website, they may be given CDs or they could use LMS portals. Depending on the geographical location and available bandwidth, companies can choose the format in which the course can be deployed. These formats become handy when users need to adapt to new technology or software platform within a short period of time.

Online Training Solutions have become a norm with big software applications development organizations like Microsoft and Adobe. They have a dedicated online platform through which training is imparted not only to corporate clients but also to individual learners. With rapid technological changes, online training is the best way to train individuals on software applications.

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