4 Corporate Training Trends to Follow

There are plenty of corporate training trends out there, and these trends are largely driven by the needs of many organizations, each of which require their personnel to have different skills sets and expertise. Understanding the impetus and demand behind these trends is important because they help to define how companies think about their personnel, and the strategies they employ to train them.

Furthermore, they can also tell us a lot about their long term goals as well as those areas within their workforce that they would like to develop in the future. So if you want to know more about these corporate training trends and their implications then here are four examples that you may want to consider.

4 Corporate Training Trends to Follow

Distance Learning 

Distance learning is a corporate training trend which serves the needs of personnel who are always on the go. This learning trend is usually aimed at core personnel, who are almost always required to handle multiple tasks on multiple locations, and who therefore, cannot consistently participate in a non-virtual learning environment. 

With regards to its main characteristics, distance learning takes into account several important factors, including:

•  Physical separation between the trainer and the trainee
•  The availability of two way communications and two way data links
•  The availability of prepackaged courseware
•  Widespread peer support within the company

Aside from its main features, it’s also worth mentioning that distance learning involves the applications of several tools and methods, including: 

• Virtual classrooms
• Audio and visual links between instructors and personnel
• Software applications
• Polling technology

Due to the nature of distance learning, it is often heavily interrelated with online learning, which is already more or less well established in most organizations. However, despite its reliance on technology, it would erroneous to describe distance learning as just another form of e-learning. This learning system also focuses on effective time management techniques, consistent communication and encourages good interpersonal relationships between the instructors and their trainees.

Action Learning

Action learning has been around for awhile now, but it has take on new characteristics of late. This particular corporate training trend is designed a little like an apprenticeship in the sense that trainees learn as they perform their work. This training trend has become popular mainly because it focuses on actual results instead of theories and lectures. 

Action learning includes the following features:

• Learning is achieved through active experience
• It gives teams and personnel real problems to solve
• It promotes communication, resilience and determination
• It promotes continuous learning among personnel

Despite the popularity of action learning, it’s important to remember that it also has a few weaknesses as well. For one thing, action learning often lacks the theoretical grounding that most conventional classes offer. This limits its scope in certain areas, and conditions personnel to focus on common tasks while neglecting less common ones. 

Another problem is that action learning methods may lead to conditioned responses from trainees, in the sense that they can only do their work in very specific ways. Despite these flaws, though, it’s clear that action learning is a great way to get practical results from personnel. 

Personalized Training

Personalized training could easily be described as a form of customized training. This teaching paradigm can be applied on all levels of an organization, but is more commonly applied on core personnel who form the critical staff of any organization. 

Personalized training focuses on creating content which can be provided in several modalities. It is designed to accommodate learners across a wide spectrum of categories and backgrounds. Furthermore, it encourages trainers to adapt to the needs of their trainees, and to develop lessons which can be changed on the spot whenever necessity dictates. 

Personalized training, therefore, can be summarized as follows:

• It’s very flexible.
• Its modules and learning strategies are designed to adapt to different groups and trainees
• It can be changed or improved at a moment’s notice
• It’s ideal for personnel who don’t have a lot of experience in a corporate environment (i.e. entry level employees)

E-Learning

Finally, we have e-Learning or, as it’s sometimes called, online learning. Despite being one of the most common trends of personnel training, it’s not easy to define precisely what e-learning is. Broadly speaking, e-learning is a training paradigm which incorporates electronic gadgets, training software, learning apps and mobile devices. However, like other corporate training trends, it’s also important to remember that e-learning uses instructors and learning strategies, which means that it’s more than just the gadgets that it uses. 

What makes e-learning special, however, is that it represents how technologically inclined a particular organization is, such that a company or business which is heavily invested in technology, such as software companies for example, are more likely to incorporate e-learning modules in their learning strategies than say, a fruit distributor. 

Likewise, large organizations which handle large amounts of resources are also more likely to incorporate a lot of e-learning methods in their training strategies than small or medium scale businesses. Therefore, in thinking about e-learning as a corporate training trend, it’s important to remember that it has the following characteristics: 

• It relies on technology
• In most cases, it reflects how much resources a particular organization has
• It seeks to optimize existing learning systems within an organization
• It evolves as technology evolves

Conclusion 

These trends represent a brief overview of how corporations think about their core personnel and the methods that they most prefer in training them. Furthermore, these trends are not mutually exclusive, and they can easily be combined, blended or customized in various ways to suit the needs of a particular organization. 

However, the most important aspect of these various trends is that they represent a sort of adaptation to the labor market. As major organizations develop new characteristics, so too will they require their personnel to undergo similar adaptations. Therefore, most training trends can also be thought of as methods for helping personnel to adapt to their own organizations, and given the ongoing evolution of the global corporate workforce, it’s very likely that more corporate training trends will emerge in the future.