Online Training Job Aids: Critical Information Just a Click Away!

“Never memorize something that you can look up.” – Albert Einstein

Do we really need job aids in the digital era? Let’s check this scenario. A sales executive is about to meet a prospect. He forgot the latest changes in the price list of products. His company slashed the rates of a wide range of products in an offer and he is not sure of them. He knows that being specific about offers and the latest prices is the key to making a sales deal.

At this crucial juncture, his company’s newly developed mobile sales enablement app for iPads came to his rescue. The sales rep received the new price list on his tablet in the form of PDFs through push notifications. With a tap, and a click he is able to find the information he needs without stumbling and mumbling through his interaction with a prospect.

Failure to remember

Dependence on job-aids is steadily increasing with the explosive growth of gadgets and applications. The Association for Talent Development (ATD) 2015 conference survey revealed that the biggest challenge faced by a majority of training managers is training reinforcement. Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus’ research shows that people forget nearly half of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless they consciously review the learned material. Based on the mentioned survey and research, online job aids play a crucial role in helping employees perform better in their jobs.

In the early days, job aids were on paper with, posters, manuals, check lists that employees could pin up. With advances in technology, it is now possible to create and provide these in various digital formats.

Let’s check a few online job aids to help your workforce get the critical numbers, steps, or information they need.

Checklists

A checklist is usually a list of to-dos or items that need to be checked to ensure safety or follow a process. We can’t rely on just human memory to complete complex tasks and this is where checklists come in. For example, pilots always use a checklist before they take off. They are NOT expected to remember because if they are – then the lives of hundreds of people will be dependent on the pilot remembering to check everything.

How-to-Guides

You learn the steps to do a job in your training process. But after sometime, you may need assistance to do that task. If that is a complex process, you definitely need a guide, because you may forget some steps. For example, you can provide an online step-by-step help guide for your service technicians to install complex heavy machinery.

PDFs

You can help employees reorient themselves with classroom sessions and retain better effectively with interactive PDFs. By these, learners can overcome the challenge of retention. In a classroom, you may present50-60 slides. However, you can present that information concisely in PDF documents for learners’ reference. In online courses, you can upload these PDF documents in the ‘Resources’ section.

Bite-sized videos

Short video clips of 3-5 minutes help your workforce recollect the essence of the classroom training. For example, you conduct a classroom session for your sales teams on selling skills and objection handling techniques. You can give a summary and the key learning points in bite-sized videos so that your sales teams can review it just before meeting potential customers.

(Check this bite-sized video to the essence of the classroom training given to sales reps)

Much of the e-learning content you offer during online training is simply forgotten when your workforce goes back to day jobs. Adding job aids to your e-learning can be the saving grace. Job aids will help your workforce feel confident and improve their workplace performance because they know that the information they need is just a click away.

Are you using Job Aids to help your workforce apply what they learned in training in their jobs? If you’re interested in adding job aids to your online training programs, contact us.