Home » Employee Training » How an Online Employee Training Program Can Revolutionize Your Training
You need a good employee training program to get your new employees started with the right skills and the right expectations. You also need a good training program for when you want your employees to learn new skills or to adopt new processes within your organization.
Whether you want to develop your own training program or use one that is already commercial available, you should consider an online employee training program. Here are a few ways that such a program can benefit and revolutionize your training:
It Can Be Easily Updated and Customized
An online employee training program has the ultimate benefit of being able to be updated or customized easily and quickly. The program can be accessed from anywhere by anyone, and materials can be added or subtracted at any time without much difficulty and without a major time commitment.
Think of it like updating a website: You can quickly go in and change simple things like the color or size of a font, and with a few clicks of a mouse, you can do things like add photos, replace text with video, or add whole new pages. You can do the same with the right online training program.
When you are shopping for an existing online program, you need to be sure that the program allows such customization. Some have been designed to be proprietary and unchangeable. Don’t make any assumptions about what will be possible; always ask what you can do before you commit.
Wherever possible, ask for a demo of the program before you buy. You’ll be able to play around with customizing it to see how easy that will be in practice, and that will give you a good idea of what to expect. Don’t wait until you’ve already spent a lot of money on the program to learn that you won’t be able to customize it or that doing so will be very difficult.
Provide Accessibility to More People in More Places
Company structure is evolving in today’s marketplaces. Fewer companies have all of their employees working in one location or even in offices. Instead, more companies have multiple locations, and they are allowing employees flexible working arrangements that include working from home, libraries, and coffee shops. Some might work in the office part time, and some may never come in, other than a virtual video call.
Offering training to remote employees can get tricky – and expensive. If your training program is an in-person one, how do you offer it to them? Do you pay to have all the employees meet in one place? Or do you pay to hire multiple trainers or to send one trainer to multiple locations?
If you have an online employee training program, you don’t have to worry about these issues. All your employees can access the program from anywhere at any time, and they can get the same benefits as they would from an in-person program.
You’ll have to design the program well or choose a program that has been designed well to ensure that it will be effective for employees who don’t have in-person support. The materials should be comprehensive, and there should be extensive support from the online materials provided, as well as from people available by phone and by chat.
Using an online program can ensure that you stay on schedule since your employees will be able to access at any time and from any location. You don’t have to get held back by the ability or the budget to get everyone in the same place at the same time.
It Can Easily Meet the Needs of Different Types of Learners
Not everyone learns the same way. Some absorb information better when they read it, while others need to hear it spoken aloud to process it better. Others need to actively do things with their hands to process information and learn new concepts.
With an online employee training program, you are better able to meet the needs of multiple types of learners, ensuring that your training is actually effective. With the right program, you’ll be able to save time by helping employees learn the information well the first time around – instead of having to reinforce the information and provide additional training.
An online training program can include articles, manuals, and all kinds of other written material. It can also include videos, infographics, interactive graphics, charts, and other visual aids. It can include games, songs, and instructions for hands-on experiments and demonstrations.
The right online training program can include modules that will appeal to every type of learner you might have within your organization. It can even be updated to meet the needs of those with disabilities.
It Can Be Easily Monitored to Determine Compliance and Track Goals
How do you know how effective your training program has been? Or even if everyone has attended it? You can ask people to sign in for the session, but not everyone complies.
The easiest way to monitor how many employees have participated in the training, as well as to understand how the training has worked to meet your goals, is to choose an online employee training program.
Every time someone logs into the training program, you will be able to see that. You will even know how long they stayed in the session, which will tell you if they just logged in and left, if they left halfway through a session, or if they completed the whole session. You’ll know with certainty how many employees completed the training and whether they were in full compliance.
You’ll also be able to monitor completion of your goals in relation to your training, though you might need to partner the program with another software solution. For example, if you use a change management program like WalkMe, you can monitor how well your training is helping you to meet your sales goals or to improve the efficiency of a new production process.
You’ll need to identify specific goals for your training, and those goals will need to be measurable. Then you can set up a system for monitoring your success.
Ability to Create an Ongoing Resource for Reference or Continued Training
When employees are done with the training program, that shouldn’t mean that the program is useless until the next time you need to conduct a training session. A good online employee training program can be customized to turn into a useful, ongoing resource.
For example, you should be able to upload manuals and other reference material to the training program that employees can access later when they need to remember how to do something. Resources can include the steps for a procedure, the numbers for vendors or suppliers, safety guidelines, code regulations, and much, much more. You should be able to put whatever useful reference materials you need to in your training program.
An online training program can revolutionize the way you perform training, which can reverberate through the rest of your company processes. Make sure you research your options thoroughly so that you choose the right online training program to get the most benefits for your company. And, of course, you can always hire someone to create the perfect online training program to meet your company needs exactly.
