Employers have always sought to educate their employees. A trained employee is far more useful than an employee who has not been helped to develop the skills they need. Here are some of the ways in which employee training has changed of late.
Learning From Home
The rise of video conferencing platforms like Zoom will not have passed you by. In the last year, thanks to the pandemic, more and more people have been working from home and using video conferencing platforms to access in-person meetings. In April 2020, 46.6 percent of people in employment in the UK did some of their work from home.
The cultural uptake of these services has bled through into training. More and more companies are offering training from home. This can include interactive tests, research tasks, and online seminars.
Centralized Learning Platforms
Training has historically been a rather scattered and fractious affair. Employers and 3rd party trainers have had to guide and assess training across lots of different platforms. Seminars, tests, group activities, and feedback have usually been completely separated from one another.
In recent years, many companies have become aware of just how inefficient and wasteful this separation can be. Centralized learning platforms have allowed employers to monitor and distribute training from one dashboard.
Automated Scaling
It has always been essential to scale training efforts up or down depending on how much people are actually learning. This is usually a rather time-consuming process involving the human analysis of feedback from all sorts of sources. Companies like thinqi.com have made this process a great deal more efficient.
They have automated scaling using Artificial Intelligence technology. Using intelligent software, platforms like Thinqi can analyze a huge quantity of varied data to assess the scaling needs of a workforce in training. Employers can then be shown easy-to-understand visualizations of this data analysis. It is very likely that smart scaling will be in near-ubiquitous use in the world of employee training very soon.
Short And Sweet Bursts Of Learning
Traditionally, employers would set aside the occasional week for an intensive training course. They would remove employees from their posts and absolutely soak them in new information with the hope that some of it would stick. The problem is that it very rarely did. Research has shown that occasional lengthy training programs that are not backed up by constant learning are incredibly ineffective. Humans are typically subjected to something called a ‘forgetfulness curve’. This means that if something is not reinforced within a short timeframe, then it tends to be forgotten. The efficiency sapping nature of taking employees out of work for training means that they cannot have their training regularly reinforced.
Modern trainers take a different approach. They circumvent the forgetfulness curve by offering employees very small bursts of training on the job and then reinforcing it up to once every week. This has two benefits.
1: Employees retain the knowledge that they are taught.
2: Less time is spent taking employees away from their duties for intensive training courses.
