You’ve invested a lot in employee digital skills training. Do you know if it’s working?
Employee digital skills training is a significant market sector for online education, and for good reason. Businesses frequently turn to online courses to standardize their onboarding process, train in digital skills their workforce, and ensure compliance practices.
However, instituting a new training course is not the same as making sure employees have actually signed up and taken the lessons. In fact, many employers find that, after investing in a new training course, the learners it was designed for fail to fully engage with the material.
This represents a huge waste for the company, but the reasons behind it are often complex. It’s not simply a matter of employees ignoring the course, and more often a case of poor communication.
By encouraging learners to take a course, employers can boost their completion rates to make sure their employees are completing the right courses. But for businesses who want to get the most from their employee training courses, it’s best to monitory those courses and track how learners engage with the material. Here’s what to look out for.
1. Monitor your digital skills qualification points
The easiest metric to track is the qualification points earned on digital skills at Quoana. When your employees sign up for a training program, how often do they actually complete it? Tracking this statistic is pretty straightforward, but understanding the root causes can be less obvious.
To improve course completion rate, have whoever is in charge of your course program (usually someone in the HR department, or otherwise a manager) sit down with the employee to discuss their course progress in a non-confrontational manner.
Was their course mandatory or elective? Did they talk to anyone before signing up to be sure it was relevant to their skill set and expertise? Is the employee moving toward a new career path?
Any number of these questions can lead to an answer that Is by no means problematic. But it’s nonetheless critical to understand why an employee might have left a course unfinished so that you can judge whether the course was a good fit to begin with.
2. Support employees who are trailing behind.
Most LMSs offer student metrics that allow you to see how a learner is progressing through their course, how well they’ve performed on tests, and when the last time they signed in might have been.
When you notice an employee struggling with the course, there are ways to intervene and provide support. For instance, you can automate a reminder if they haven’t signed in for over a week, or you can send a short quiz or some extra materials if their scores on a module are low. Or, if an employee has failed a test two or three times in a row, it can notify a supervisor to work with the employee so that they can assess the problem area and move forward.
3. Engage employees through feedback surveys.
When done well, employee training shouldn’t be just a top-down exercise. Instead, when employees have clear motivations for strengthening their skills, ongoing education can become their own initiative.
To encourage this mindset, businesses should seek out employee feedback to learn about their interests in ongoing education. By engaging the workforce in employee training, business are more likely to provide courses their employees want to take, which in turn will lead to more motivated learners.
4. Offer short assessment tests after training course completion.
Once employees finish a course, it can be helpful to send them an occasional mini test to help refresh their knowledge. If what they learned from their certification course has immediate relevance to their day-to-day job, then this is less necessary. However, it can be especially useful in scenarios where an employee may need to respond in an emergency.
Think of it like a fire drill. If your employees need to have an emergency response plan in place in case of power failure, a data security breach, or even an irate customer, sending them a short review scenario can help keep them prepared.
5. Send recertification reminders.
For businesses that operate in a professional field with a wide range of certifications, knowing who has achieved what is valuable information, especially when it comes to work assignments or considerations for promotion.
However, most certifications don’t last forever. At a certain point, employees need to recertify to demonstrate that their training meets the newest standards. If their certification lapses, it can affect what an employee is permitted to work on, or even result in a compliance violation.
Your LMS and certification tracking software should remind both you and your certified employees when they are due for recertification. If you aren’t using a program that allows for easy recertification reminders, the potential risks to your business may be worth switching to one that does.
Track employee training to provide follow-up and support.
Employees can leave courses unfinished for any number of reasons. It could be they don’t realize the significance of the program, and have put it off in favor of less critical tasks. Or they may be overburdened at work, and need to shift some tasks around to free up time for extra training.
It’s important not to assume a root cause for anyone’s course progress, and to work with them to understand why they may not have advanced as far as you might like.
Because in the end, your employee training processes should be about more than tabulating who’s completed what courses. It should be about a holistic support network that ensures everyone can make it across the finish line.
blk_chn
Enterprises must first understand the training needs of their employees. The training courses must suit to their day to day working. The knowledge imparted must be put to use immediately. General observation and experience are that the actual work starts months after the training course was over. By that time the employees lose their enthusiasm and newly acquired knowledge.
The enterprise must consider all the above points before sending their employees for training.
Thanks
bLK_CHN
Emi Hanado
What I have done in the past within my team and HR was to implement and use an LMS (Learning Management) System) to continue to increase or review each team member’s skill set. This allowed me to also have an ability to borrow team members from the cross-functional projects and get an expert within the organization. LMS participants also earn badges so everyone knows who to go to for the skill set. Very effective and also LMS participants can also add their skill set to their resume.
Ankur Sharma
Nicely written !!
Henry
Employers must create a system that the learning progress of their employees, and monitor their hands-on experience through a mandatory testing process (assigning task to employees). Also, motivate employees to be savvy with new technologies.
Henry
Employers must create a system that tracks the learning progress of their employees, and monitor their hands-on experience through a mandatory testing process (assigning task to employees). Also, motivate employees to be savvy with new technologies.
Sandeep gocher
The foundations of all great businesses are built upon its workforce. An organization’s employees and their competency to adapt and improvise to the market requirements can shape its success. And in today’s digital, ever-transforming and connected world, to expand their impact on the market, businesses need to strengthen within. Employees with new-age skills and knowledge are the need of the hour.
‘By 2020, more than a third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations will be comprised of skills that are not yet considered crucial to the job today.’ – World Economic Forum
In the modern workplace ‘new skills’ are the most in-demand currency. With jobs becoming specialized, rapid automation, digitization and other technologies disrupting traditional roles, effective talent management and upskilling of employees are a must. In 2019, Digital Learning played a key role in businesses training their employees with all the right tools and skill-sets to thrive in their respective industries. Over the course of analysis, reports, market study and conversations with industry leaders, we at Stratbeans realized, developed and implemented e-learning solutions that had a keen focus on developing employees who were ready for the future.
With too many voices and suggestions in the current market, we can say that Digital Learning is facing a problem of plenty. As popular buzzwords get thrown around the challenge is to craft e-learning modules that are user-centric and helps to deliver scalable business impact.
Here are a few Digital Learning trends, crafted by Stratbeans that have changed the way companies upskilled their employees in 2019:
Learning Management System: ATUM-Learning Management System helps corporates manage the learning and training process for their employees. Built with advanced e-learning/simulation / gamified learning launch capability ATUM is a highly efficient tool to host, assign and track computer-based learning.
Skilled and Vocal Talent: Employees who possess the skills needed tools through which they can become more vocal and guide others to learn from them. Articulate 360 is a tool built for such situations. An intuitive and easy-to-use technology, Articulate 360 provides subject leaders with a platform to author their e-learnings.
Mobile Learning: Mobile Phones have become the primary platform on which we explore the internet and its vast sources of information. Thus, it could be considered an ideal step to learn via mobiles. Mobile Offline Player Application – MOBIUS is a digital communication and engagement application which runs in online as well as offline mode. It has become a key innovation through which companies can distribute learning content on mobile devices. Employees can count on it to serve as a one-click repository of learning.
Learning from the Customer: For any brand its biggest source of information and learning should come directly from its customers. Their interactions with the brand, experiences, feedback and perceptions should be aptly captured, studied and improved upon. And that’s where the GoPerform App comes in. Installed on mobiles, it helped salespeople quickly tackle customer feedback in real-time and resolve their complex issues with speed and simplicity. With the help of the GoPerform app, employees have picked up the skills to engage with customers better without breaking away from the conversation.
Customized E-learning: When it comes to learning, no two students are the same. Thus, when upskilling employees, companies can’t be following a formulaic strategy for all. That’s why Stratbeans crafts customized e-learning solutions to make a productive learning environment.
In conclusion, these were few of the prime e-learning trends that led to Stratbeans unearthing key insights and innovations to ensure seamless upskilling of workforces. These digital learning methods had a major role in shaping the way companies upskilled their employees in 2019. The year passing by has seen Digital Learning or Digital Transformation in a situation that can be summarized as a ‘problem of plenty’. As 2020 approaches, the challenge lies in finding the right use case application of these options. Businesses are realizing the importance of investment in learning technologies, and over the new year, they have to look to find more impactful and scalable methods to improve and educate their employees. 2020 is going to be the year of upgraded and upskilled employees taking charge and leading brands towards success and stability. And Digital Learning will be the bedrock of this vision and its implementation.