Training is one of the most undervalued parts of a business. Getting your personnel educated on everything from HR procedures to safety techniques is essential to making sure that they’re successful, productive workers. Everyone benefits when everyone is trained well.
But that can be a difficult objective to reach, especially once a process moves beyond the startup phase. During that time, everyone has to be trained, so there’s a great deal of attention paid to the education process. But once everyone completes it, it seems to fade from everyone’s priority list. Consequently, when attrition puts new people into the system, they often aren’t trained at a level as high as the senior people. Productivity can suffer and leave the company struggling to identify just exactly where the problem is.
Fortunately, technology has come to the rescue of firms that are struggling with this. It’s no longer necessary for companies to have trainers going face-to-face with employees for every single training activity. The use of learning management software (LMS) provides a great technique for overcoming the most common issues associated with training personnel. Knowing what’s available and what’s coming for LMS can put you ahead of the training curve.
Consistency
If you’ve ever been a teacher or trainer and had to give a talk about the same topic several times, you probably reached a point where you couldn’t remember if you had covered every point yet. Did you talk about the new environmental regulations yet, or was that at the 10 am session? Repetition can quickly make each subsequent delivery of lower quality than the previous one, to the detriment of the learners.
And instructors who must repeatedly go through the same material often lose their energy and enthusiasm. This leading to a corresponding decrease in those feelings among the learners. Training rapidly becomes a chore instead of an important part of the development of the business and its workers.
Training with technology takes care of that problem. The same message is delivered verbatim as many times as it’s needed, with no inconsistencies or omissions. In this way, the workers who are trained in the morning get the exact same education as those who are trained in the evening. And those who will train tomorrow will get the same as those who trained a year ago.
Recommended for you: Securing an LMS (Learning Management System).
Convenience
Scheduling is a major challenge for every workplace. When it’s further complicated by telecommuting, multiple shifts, and traveling staff, it can reach a point where trainers almost have to be on call 24/7 just to get everyone the training they need.
With digital training, flexibility is maximized. The day shift can watch it in the early afternoon, while the night shift can watch it at 3 am. Off-site personnel can connect to WiFi at a hotel in Chicago or Beijing and get the complete lesson at whatever time is best for them.
But it isn’t just about when your workers learn. It’s also about tracking their learning. LMS lets you build transcripts and evaluation data on participants, simplifying the process from paper-based systems. The ability to track training through a simple electronic system simplifies everything from evaluations to promotions for personnel in every role.
Cost
It will come as no surprise that going to an LMS instead of in-person instructors can be much less expensive. The purchase of software is more than offset by the reduction in the staff needed to conduct training. As you can probably guess, paying a live instructor to perform the same training multiple times costs a lot more than paying for a software the repeat the same thing over and over.
Updates are simpler as well. Rather than re-training trainers and then printing a ton of environmentally-unfriendly materials, the LMS can quickly be updated with new information and provided to your workers. The turnaround time for innovation drops sharply, getting workers into new techniques quickly, allowing the company to capture new opportunities rapidly.
Training personnel is one of the most important things a company does. It results in better products, greater efficiency, improved safety and lower costs. When the process is done in a cost-effective way, the benefits are even greater. LMS represents an excellent strategy for getting all of these benefits and more with a much lower cost than traditional teaching by live instructors.
