We can all relate to our student days when getting good marks meant sitting through many boring lectures and spending hours to study and practice. I would only dream then and wish someone could invent a chip that would transfer all the physics or biology knowledge to my brain the night before the exam.
Similarly, Enterprise training today is not far from that boring, ineffective reality – it is perceived as a mandated HR task to tick a box and that is where it ends. What if your organization moved away from such outdated methods of training?
In our previous article, “Why Enterprise Training is Outdated” we talked about various attributes that make enterprise training a highly boring, ineffective, and inefficient task due to several factors such as –
- Information-heavy content with no effort on knowledge retention, recollection, and reinforcement.
- Theoretical content with little or no relevance to real-time scenarios.
- Training schedules that are infrequent or inconvenient rather than ‘need-of-the-hour’.
- Boring and tiresome teaching with lack of engaging, interactive sessions.
- One-size fits-all approach allowing no personalization in terms of content, pace and mode of training
- Lack of real assessment and motivation leading to a casual approach to training, where the sole aim becomes only attending them and not to really gain knowledge.
Eventually, training becomes a namesake checkbox with no real measurement or monitoring of actual outcomes. This scenario is common across all formats of training. In this article, we will explore some interesting ways to address these issues and make training effective and engaging.
Traditional training is delivered through three broad channels – in-person, live-online and self-learning portals. All of them follow these basic steps: go through content, complete an assessment and get certified. The big gap in these approaches is “what happens after training”. As humans, we forget what we learn after some time unless there is monitoring and reinforcement. We will explore how to address this challenge to make enterprise training effective.
An effective Enterprise Training Model:
For enterprise training to be effective, the right solution must be simple and easy for the learner and measurable and monitorable for management at all levels.
Bite-size learning
In this fast-paced world, most people do not have the time or attention span to absorb pages of long documents or sit through hours of training and retain all that knowledge. It is far easier to consume information in small bits on a regular basis. Light-weight content is not only engaging and easy to consume, but is also accessible over any device and makes it convenient to the user.
Personalized for each individual
Why should we force every individual to go through every page or minute of the content (if they already know some of that material)? Dave Meier (author of The Accelerated Learning Handbook) said, “We don’t know what we don’t know”! This is where every training initiative should begin – knowing what everyone does not know and customizing the training towards filling these gaps. Personalized trainings adapted to such individual needs and knowledge gaps provide motivation to learn and create an effective method of training.
Retention, Reinforcement and Recognition
Efficacy of any training programs is proven only when the knowledge imparted is retained. Such retention comes through personalized reinforcement, recollection and recognition. Peer challenges, peer rankings, quizzes, rewards and recognition, gamification models that encourage prompt and regular learning help to keep the fun factor alive in training and ensure high user engagement.
Continuous, Real-time Training
In today’s business environment where things are constantly changing, product cycles are shorter and there is a higher level of expectation from customers, it is absolutely important to facilitate continuous training and upskilling. A new employee cannot wait for the next quarter’s training session or frontline sales people cannot wait to know about competitor comparisons. A culture of continuous learning and upskilling in the organization helps to keep the employees up-to-date on the latest in products, process, sales, customer services, safety, compliance and more.
Do it the RapL Way!!
