Employee education in a corporate environment has a number of challenges to overcome that performing training in smaller business environments, or in non-business environments do not always contend with. At the same time, though, there are a number of concerns and obstacles that do exist across the board, even if training experts in other environments will rigidly argue against that fact.
Employee education in general is a difficult thing, because professionals are busy people who can often take solace, in the face of hard working life, in the fact that they are free of the rigors of education, which all sit firmly in the past for them. This breeds a bit of resentment and dread among employees when faced with training.
Along with this, finding the time to train them effectively while not reducing their productivity in daily working life, but also not trespassing upon their personal time or overworking them by layering things on top of their existing workload results in a hairy situation to say the least.
Well, now that we see the problems, how can we address some of these effectively? We can start by first addressing that problem of training being tedious and unpleasant in its traditional form. Use of gamification is a way to improve engagement and enjoyability. This will improve effectiveness of training by reducing the low level of cooperation that traditional training often causes.
That can solve the problem of unfreezing people, and improving their receptiveness to training, but it doesn’t solve the problem of people being very busy, and there are a number of problems to solve here. This is the meat of our concern, in fact.
Training employees in corporate environments can be disruptive of daily processes if they must completely drop everything they are doing in order to go through training exercises in total. So, a good solution to partially make the training overall productive is to use an onboarding system like WalkMe, which can guide them through learning a system by using it, as WalkMe guides them safely step by step through using designs. This allows them to safely perform real work while they learn how to do it.
That alleviates part of it, but for those times when you must actually take them from their work schedule, and in the very rare (avoid at all costs) times you must ask them to devote some extra time above their work hours, there are other things to consider.
Making these times pleasant social occasions (with food, activities and other modern training concepts) is a good way to make the negative impacts of biting into these times less significant.
So, employee education in a corporate environment is a tricky prospect, and while the actual internal aspects of training doesn’t change just because it’s corporate or large scale, the trappings around training should adapt to account for busy people who regard themselves as having neither the time nor desire to be bothered with “more school”. These changes, however, are not applicable only to corporate environments, though, and most of these changes should be applied to all education and training scenarios from preschool all the way up to college and beyond. It’s time to rethink training and education.
