E-learning has found its place in the corporate training sector by helping organizations offset the challenges faced with instructor-led training. Read how and the challenges it addresses.
For any organization, its people are its most precious asset. This is why nurturing educated, visionary, passionate employees is critical to organizations today. This is the main reason organizations focus on training their employees to become the best. Especially in the corporate sector, training is given high importance and is one of the investments organizations make.
According to a report by Roland Berger, 77% of US companies offer online corporate training to employees.
Due to the global expansion of organizations, it is becoming increasingly challenging for them to provide standardized training to employees situated both locally and globally. Many factors such as cost, time, managing, rolling out the training, and more make this process of providing effective trainings and refreshers challenging. This is the reason e-learning has found its place in the corporate training sector by helping organizations offset the challenges faced with instructor led training. Even in industries such as health care, financial services, entertainment, education and government, e-learning offers several long term benefits.
In fact, today corporations are the largest users of e-learning to train their staff on new products, processes, services, software applications, soft skills, and customer relations. Let us look at how e-learning provides solutions to their training challenges.
Global Outreach
International companies have ties with various countries, branches in various locations, and employees coming in from diverse regions. Isn’t providing standardized training to employees, scattered globally, challenging? It sure is. Although organizations can conduct instructor led trainings from time to time, instructors keep changing and so does the quality of trainings. Standardization is lost in this process.
Deloitte, one of the Fortune 500 companies uses online learning courses such as Deloitte Leadership Academy (DLA) for training its employees and customers.
E-learning courses provide organizations the benefit of accessing standardized training, anywhere anytime. The best feature e-learning offers a corporate organization is easy translations. E-learning courses can be translated easily into local languages and rolled out to employees. In this way, global organizations can reap the benefits of a standardized training.
Tracking and Monitoring
It is well known that rolling out training programs alone is not sufficient for the perfect execution of a training program. Constant monitoring, tracking, and assessing are required. But with the growing number of employees and their job diversity, it becomes quite hard for a training manager to manage the monitoring process. For this reason, a Learning Management System can be used. An LMS will help training managers roll out the e-learning courses, track their employees’ progress, notify them about refresher trainings, assess their performance, conduct quizzes and tests, and send reports to regulatory authorities. What could be more compelling for organizations to shift from traditional methods to using technology and e-learning for their trainings?
Cost and Time Efficiency
According to Merck Capital Ventures, for the Pharma industry that spends a billion dollars on training its sales force online, training comes as a boon as it helps impart training at considerably lower cost.
Using e-learning to train employees is both cost and time efficient. How? Imagine a global organization investing in travel costs, accommodation, and other necessities every time a classroom training session needs to be conducted. This would punch a huge hole in the organization’s budget. Weigh in the requirement of refresher classroom trainings and the budget would shoot even higher.
This is where e-learning courses help organizations reduce their costs and time allocated for training. They also make the training process more effective. How? Refresher courses can be given anytime and accessed from anywhere, making them flexible and time effective. Employees no longer have to travel to a location to access a training, that too one which won’t stay for long in their minds. E-learning courses can be accessed anywhere, reducing costs and employees have the flexibility to learn at their own pace, reducing the time allocated to conduct huge training sessions.
Moreover, it is an indirect one-on-one training approach where every employee taking the e-learning course is assessed through the course. This approach is proven to be more beneficial than the approach where one instructor instructs many employees.
Training for Disparate Roles
According to IBM, eLearning can help companies boost productivity by 50%. Every $1 spent in eLearning results in $30 of productivity.
Customized courses are always a hit with organizations. Why? Even a small organization will have employees performing different roles and assuming different responsibilities. Giving the same training to an employee in a higher role such as an administrator and an employee who isn’t responsible for admin duties can actually make the training ineffective.
Customized e-learning courses provide the luxury of rolling out training courses targeting employees’ needs, roles, and responsibilities. It blends the need for computers in classroom situations with providing classroom experiences when computers alone can’t teach the subject well enough.
Different Training Delivery Methods
According to the 2014 training industry report, the training delivery methods for 2014 were, 47% of training hours were by classroom and increased by 3% as compared to the previous year. 29.1% of training hours were delivered with blended learning. 28.5% of training hours were delivered via online or computer based technologies. 1.4% of training hours were delivered via mobile devices.
Learners with varying speeds of understanding and different learning styles can benefit from e-learning with its various learning techniques greatly, where each learning experience is a step they climb as they progress from one stage to another. Let us look at some of the popularly used delivery methods.
Video-based Learning
This form of delivery is mainly used in the manufacturing and food processing sectors. Employees in these sectors can be well trained using appealing visual aids and graphics, with narrations and voice-overs. Employees having less dexterity with the mouse and keyboard can also access video-based learning courses with ease and benefit from them. They are easy to develop, roll out, and access.
Check out sample video-based courses here
Scenario-based Learning
This is yet another popular delivery method to train corporate employees. Scenario-based learning courses use the power or scenarios, case studies, and stories to rouse the interest levels of learners. These courses present the learner a scenario where he is taken through various phases and is asked to input his decisions. Choosing the right and wrong options will give him instant feedback. Feedback for the wrong answer will help the learner understand why he is wrong and approach the right answer. Feedback for the right answer will reinforce what the learner has learned previously. Such learning improves his decision making skills and also helps him transfer the knowledge to his workplace. This is effective to train employees in the corporate sector on compliances, sales, and other software trainings.
Check out a sample scenario-based course here
Game-based Learning
These courses contain game like elements in the course. Learners, when they complete a given task successfully, are leveled up or awarded a badge or given points. These motivate learners, inspiring them to perform well in the training.
Check out sample game-based learning courses here
Gamification
Gamification is teaching learners with the help of games. The technique of gamification can also be used for creating assessments. These work the same way as game-based courses, motivating, inspiring, and instilling healthy competition among the learners.
Check out some gamified assessments here
There are many other methods of delivering e-learning courses you can choose based on the needs and requirements of your employees and the type of the training required. With a blended learning model, you can combine elements to reach a particular learning solution. A company may choose any blend depending on its needs, and a variety of factors such as need, time, costs, and ready content available. E-learning has been and will be providing time and cost efficient corporate solutions.
