Nowadays, a growing number of companies are turning to online employee training for a comprehensive, interactive way for workers to learn. Almost 60% of learning and development professionals expect to increase spending on online learning.
Online employee training is often more economical in terms of time and money than traditional training, and it’s become more popular as the number of people with stable internet connection grows.
As companies change their focus to online training, the need for thorough communication between workers has increased, bringing a new employee training paradigm.
The recent coronavirus outbreak has changed how companies onboard, train, and induct their employees, but there’s one thing that remains the same: the need for communication.
Employees always need training and refresher courses on how to perform their jobs and contribute to achieving the company’s goals, which makes continued education fundamental if you want your company to be on the cutting edge of your industry.
Keep reading and find out how you can reshape your online training, starting with the benefits of online training.
With the outbreak of coronavirus, many software and tech companies have paused or completely stopped in-person employee training and onboarding, leaving employees to fend for themselves.
But the fact that companies can’t conduct in-person training doesn’t mean training shouldn’t happen.
That’s why instead of pausing training, you need to reshape how you train your employees, and the internet is a great place to get them started.
If you haven’t yet started the road of online training, these are some measures you can take to hit the ground running.
Read More: dotCMS Online Training Courses
Digital literacy covers a wide range of abilities that are in constant change. In recent times, this has become of utmost importance as more companies enact work from home policies.
While digital literacy cannot be taught through traditional means, you can promote it by emphasizing the real-world applications of digital assets inside and outside the worksite. For example, by using online tools to solve problems they might find at work.
While most companies invest in training, most of the initiatives they enact involve in-person instruction. One of the leading disruptive factors of the recent massive shift to remote work has been that it forces businesses to explore online training to keep their employees fit and capable.
However, keep in mind that it’s crucial that the exploration of new training alternatives has to reach every part of your company. From marketers to developers to salespeople, even the executives have to be part of the change.
Things are changing quickly, and you need to stay aware of changes in both the training landscape and the world in general. Doing so allows you to communicate those changes effectively to your employees.
A good idea would be reassessing your training policies so you can keep pace with the changes that COVID-19 has brought to the workplace, both in terms of legal and regulatory policies and digital initiatives.
In big companies, bureaucracy can slow down changes, and now might not be the time to slow things down, especially when it comes to training your employees to face this crisis. If you have numerous stakeholders, you might want to educate them first on the benefits of online training before you start with actual capacitation so as not to face roadblocks.
With that in mind, to make online employee training accessible to everyone, you need to ensure that the technical possibilities it brings are connected to what your company is and can do, finding ways to play with your strengths, such as your brand and your values.
Create engagement and community feel during the online training
When employees are used to in-person learning, they might have trouble adjusting to the online learning experience. Explain how online learning is different from traditional learning methods and help them feel part of a community of learners, even when they’re all working from home.
Also, make sure that your employees feel as if the instructor is right there with them. Create spaces for one-on-one discussions with the instructors and foster collaboration among peers to build a sense of community that will help your employees engage with your content.
Online training falls under the umbrella of eLearning and has a series of advantages compared to traditional training methods.
Most significantly, online training enables employees to learn at their own pace and at a time that’s convenient for them, which makes it great for self-directed training and refresher courses.
Take a look at the benefits of online training and reshape the way you train your employees.
You probably knew about this one, but online training can genuinely help during times like this because it’s always available anywhere there is an internet connection, making online programs effective for training employees across multiple locations.
Thanks to the internet, training materials are easier to come by than ever before. You can leverage technology to help your training efforts by giving your employees downloadable online notes, videos that can be replayed, and assessments or quizzes that can be taken anytime during the course.
Online learning can be turned into a social exercise. If you enable your employees to pass information and knowledge with one another, this will bring them together, creating interesting debates and discussions that lead to innovation within your company.
Standardization of your training materials can help you measure the outcomes of your programs and see who are your top performers and who needs closer support. Also, online training often enables fairer evaluation of your employees’ knowledge as it removes the pressure of tests.
Although setting an online course might be costly, it can be repurposed infinitely to serve many different cohorts of workers and new hires. Instead of printing thousands of sheets of paper, you can create one single ebook and distribute it to thousands of students. The same goes for certifications and other training materials such as stationery.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to upend traditional workplaces and more people start working from home, the need for online training has increased. With the new paradigm and the vast set of digital tools at our disposal, come concerns about the best ways of training employees.
These are some of the best and easy to integrate types of online training methods available for companies at this moment.
Simulation training is one great way of training employees because it enables teams to face real-life situations through a computer, augmented, or virtual reality. While the initial training costs can be high, it’s a strong option in riskier operations.
Simulation-based employee training enables your workers to gain first-hand knowledge of tools, software, or devices using real sample scenarios that could prepare them for when they have to interact with a new interface or solve new problems.
eLearning is the most common, cost-effective type of online employee training. It relies on online videos, tests, and online materials to deliver training to your workers. As mentioned above, the best thing about training is that employees can do their training in pretty much any device.
That being said, eLearning is the most accessible type of online training to roll out to larger companies, especially in industries with high turnover rates like the software industry, because it can be gamified to keep your employees engaged.
In this type of online training, your senior employees shine. Mentoring is a type of relational training where an experienced employee focuses on a group of employees and supervises them in a way that’s different from traditional manager-managed relationships.
Online mentoring sessions can help employees ask questions they might not feel comfortable asking in their workplace, leading to innovation and different outcomes in the workplace.
For the right group of employees, such as distributed teams, group discussions, and online activities, provide the perfect training option. Group discussions and meetings allow multiple employees to train at once in an environment that fosters cooperation between group members.
This type of training is excellent for software development teams who work together and might benefit from the feedback of the whole group. You can train your team leaders and senior employees to facilitate the discussions and create online prompts the entire team can solve together.
Not only can eLearning jumpstart your learning initiatives, but it’s also much more affordable. It can help you reduce onboarding time, which translates into employees who are better trained and able to start to work quickly.
The world won’t be on lockdown forever, but the recent changes are shaping the future of companies; that’s a fact.
Online employee training has a myriad of benefits that you can leverage in addition to in-person training once COVID-19 is defeated and shouldn’t be an afterthought in your company. Not now, not ever.
We’ve only just scratched the surface of the online training and the future of work, but one thing is sure, if you’re serious about scaling your business you need a CMS to handle your content needs.
The dotCMS platform allows most marketing teams to handle a wide range of digital marketing tasks without IT intervention. We use online training materials to help maximize content velocity and platform ROI. Check our training videos and learn more about our software.
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