During a rush of work, one of the first things we tend to skip is internal stuff, such as employee training and development. However, training your employees is critical to the future success of your company. So how could you achieve a quality training program without neglecting your commitments? E-learning platforms are powerful tools that can help you.
Let’s make it clear. There are no magical solutions in employee development. You’ll need to invest time and money to set up a training program, generate the necessary documentation and let your workforce learn from it. But the advantages of doing so, such as enhancing your employee’s skills and efficiency, and reducing delivery errors, are undeniable. It is worth the investment.
E-Learning allows you to take full advantage of this effort by making courses available everywhere at any time. This includes static courses as well as live presentations for networking communities.
Some advantages of using e-learning platforms are:
- Reducing training costs. Producing high-quality content consumes lots of time and resources, and presenting it several times is a waste of both. E-learning lets you have your content available anytime and anywhere.
- Shrink material costs. Let’s say you have to show how to test specific equipment in an operational system. If you had to use the real environment every time, costs would be extreme. By making a complete training session online, you’ll only have to set things once.
- Resolve the productivity paradox. Training your team increases your productivity, but also impacts on the time allocated to current tasks.
E-learning gives you the flexibility to train your team anytime and anywhere, reducing the impact on your daily work. - Standardization. E-learning helps you create a standard process for the content’s delivery. This process makes it easier for the employee to understand and quickly process the content. The standards will help in adhering to quality and ensuring consistency in the courses, which will, in turn, create effective learning. It will ensure consistent and quality content even when different people contributes.
- Real-time access. Live learning presentations require participants to align their schedules to the calendar. E-learning eliminates this because the course can be accessed anytime, anywhere. This is crucial when you have a globally-dispersed team.
- Freedom to fail. Let’s face it, real learning requires some failure. But no one likes to fail in a room full of other people. E-learning lets you fail without an audience. In the worst case, you can always start over.
- Improved retention. The combination of new multimedia technologies and instructional design can produce an excellent learning experience that is repeatable. Throw in some good practice activities with feedback and you have a learning environment that’s going to help your learners retain the course content which will produce results.
Migrating from an old-style training strategy to e-learning could be a big cultural challenge.
However, e-learning is cost-effective and can produce great results. It’s all a matter of how you use it.
At Intraway, we have an internal e-learning platform (Learnway), and although it’s only in its first steps, it has already almost one hundred videos that continuously train the members of our team in order to give them the necessary tools to succeed.