Technology in Training
Guy Flouch distills a recent report that looks at the needs and challenges created by an increasingly fractured and remote workforce, generated by accelerating globalisation;
In an increasingly globalised corporate culture, organisations are managing a growing number of remote workers, as well as partners, suppliers and customers. In this competitive marketplace, those same employees and stakeholders need to be increasingly well educated, both to do their jobs effectively and to make the most of the products and services at their disposal. As a result, organisations must continually train these individuals, as quickly as possible, to ensure that their people are up to speed on the latest company and product information. At the same time, organisations are being asked to shorten sales cycles and times to market, reduce costs and raise productivity.
Today's trainers are looking for a fresh approach to online training that lets them launch sessions easily, both proactively (in advance of learning) and reactively (as an educational need comes up). They need interactive online tools that let them deliver and collect feedback, tools that are simple to use for both instructors and attendees. Of course, as always, they need to keep their eye on costs, because even as the need for training arises the budgets for doing so are often on the decline.
Key communication challenges for corporate training organisations
When asked to define what concerns them most, IT executives usually rank highest the need to keep their workforce educated and informed. Add to that increased competition, pressure to cap costs and rapidly changing markets, and you have a critical need to train employees as efficiently as possible.
Corporate training success requires insightful, and relevant, classes that engage attendees while ensuring their training needs are met. Its critical to be able to catch an employees attention, keep it, and then make sure that the information imparted is understood and retained. Its also important that corporate trainers are able to offer refresher courses and follow-up classes on an at-need basis, to
ensure employees remain up to date on the latest information. Whats more, like all
learning, corporate training greatly benefits from increased collaboration.
Training Teams Require New Models for Success
The traditional training model no longer works in our increasingly global culture. Todays training organisations must educate a rapidly changing, dispersed workforce whose tools and technologies are rapidly changing. Trainers and their managers must therefore design new ways to effectively reach their audiences, melding emerging technologies and techniques with highly targeted educational environments. In doing so, theyre moving away from the conventional proactive approach (design-advertise-educate-test) to a more reactive model in which training professionals engage in a collaborative learning process with employees, customers and partners.
Modern training organisations face several complex challenges, including the need to:
• increase training reach across multiple locations, so employees are up to speed no matter where theyre located;
• extend their reach to geographically dispersed partners and customers while reducing training costs;
• create highly targeted and interactive educational sessions that engage attendees;
• provide a collaborative training process in which employees can offer feedback and interact with training professionals to get answers to questions and support their business needs;
• lay the educational foundation, then follow up with targeted, information-specific training as needed;
• empower corporate trainers and foster communication among them and their managers;
• maximise efficiency to train more people more quickly.
Proactive and Reactive Opportunities
Traditional training is proactive. That is, trainers evaluate where education is needed, set
up appropriate sessions and opportunities, invite the required attendees and teach
accordingly. Proactive training is critical in certain situations, such as when new
technology is introduced, or when details on new products or sales techniques must be
mastered by employees. Proactive training is also a great way to introduce partners and
customers to new information related to their relationships and purchases. It generally
involves one-way information sharing, with limited audience participation.
But todays fast-moving business environment also requires reactive training: the ability to
respond to educational needs and requests on the spur of the moment. These requests may arise after a proactive training session has been conducted, if attendees have questions or desire follow-up; or they may come independent of proactive training, as employees seek
expertise and skills during the course of their regular business performance. Reactive
training requires that trainers be empowered to meet their constituents needs on
demand, quickly, easily and cost-effectively. It also requires more interactive approaches,
so that employees can get a truly customised experience.
Empowering Corporate Trainers
Just as businesses need to be especially agile in todays marketplace, so, too, do corporate
trainers. This makes it particularly important to empower trainers on the front lines, so
that they can quickly react to their constituents training needs, regardless of the type or
size of the request. Giving trainers the tools and technologies to help them be effective
teachers ensures that employees training needs will be met and, therefore, that those
employees will be knowledgeable and up to speed on the latest business technologies and
techniques.
Extending Trainings Reach
As companies become more multi-locational, they have an ever-increasing base of remote workers to train. These workers may be spread out across regions, countries and even continents. They also may speak different languages and have regionally or culturally specific training needs. Furthermore, because they are less connected to their co-workers and managers, remote employees have less opportunity for ad-hoc training from peers or experts.
In addition to having more and more remote employees to train, many companies are finding that their corporate trainers may also be widely dispersed, making it even more difficult to connect the right expert to the right training event.
Furthermore, corporate training is extending its own boundaries. While, in the past,
trainers focused mainly on company employees, they are now being asked to educate a
growing number of people outside the organisation itself, including partners (who are
increasingly tightly tied to the business) and customers (as sales recognises the cross-
sell up-sell opportunities that come from a well-educated customer base). That puts even
more pressure on trainers to be reactive, to provide training on an at-need basis, no
matter where a request comes from. It also demands a more customized and interactive
training experience.
Promoting Interaction and Collaboration
With todays trainees working under a constant barrage of “must-act-now” requests (most
of which come in via email and instant messages), trainers must compete to keep their
attendees attention and ensure they leave the session with as much knowledge as
possible. The best way for them to do that is to offer truly engaging training sessions that
allow attendees to interact with the trainer, other attendees and the content itself.
It is also critical that online training solutions offer instructors the ability to gauge their
audience, just as they do when training in person. These solutions need to recreate the
ability to see facial expressions and body language, so trainers can perceive who is paying
attention and who isnt, who understands and digests the information and who needs
follow-up help.
Effective online events, meetings and collaboration
To meet the educational challenges they face today, corporate training organisations must
create dynamic learning opportunities, using new tools and technologies. Web
conferencing and collaboration products and services are increasingly being adopted as
key elements for critical business training, meeting both proactive and reactive training
needs. They enable virtual training, so employees dont need to travel and can stay
productive, before and after every educational session, immediately putting their new skills
to work. They also create opportunities for training partners and customers who might
otherwise forgo training due to the costs and constraints of travel.
Web conferencing offers users the capability to address audiences anywhere, anytime in
an Internet-based, real-time meeting environment. It is an effective way to deliver training via
presentations, product demonstrations, interactive meetings and seminars. The technology
offers rich functionality, including file and application sharing, annotation, online chat, polls
and surveys, Web co-browsing, recording and many other features.
Fueled by the increasing demand for real-time communication and its potential to deliver
huge cost and time savings, the global Web conferencing market continues to grow
rapidly, standing at $715.8 million in 2005 and forecasted to reach more than $2.8 billion
in 2011. Online meetings and events are increasingly accepted alternatives or
complements to face-to-face interactions, offering greater functionality and cost-
effectiveness than traditional training programs.
In conclusion, business buyers today have more options, less time and tighter budgets than ever before. They demand overriding value from their technology investments. Real-time collaboration technologies are making information workers more productive by getting them trained faster and more easily online. That, in turn, enables them to accelerate sales, reduce times-to-market, improve customer service, streamline communications and control costs.
US Case Study: Pearson Digital Learning
Pearson Digital Learning delivers innovative educational products to more than 20 million students every year. The company is part of Pearson Education, a global leader in integrated educational publishing, and its solutions help students from more than 50,000 schools excel in a variety of subjects, from pre-kindergarten through high school. For example, the companys SuccessMaker Enterprise product teaches reading and maths to students in elementary and middle school through digital courseware.
The regional educational consultants at Pearson Digital Learning are experts in the products they deliver, and they help schools across the United States implement the tools. A training team at the companys headquarters in Arizona, is responsible for making sure these consultants get the product education and information they need, when they need it. But sending the training team around the country to educate the consultants was impractical, and flying the consultants back to headquarters for training lowered their productivity and was prohibitively expensive.
Furthermore, because the educational consultants work from home, it was expensive for them to drive or fly to remote schools to conduct product training with teachers. Furthermore, the travel significantly impacted their productivity, too. ‘The educational consultants are often not within easy driving distance of the school, so they needed to incur travel costs and spend time traveling,’ says Stephanie Donachy, lead consultant for professional development at Pearson Digital Learning. ‘Our consultants should be training customers rather than sitting in a car or an airplane. To save money and boost productivity of
trainers and consultants, we needed a way to conduct effective remote training for both
our consultants and customers.’
Today, Pearson Digital Learning uses the Citrix® GoToMeeting Corporate software package to provide fast, cost-effective remote training over the Web. As a result, Pearson Digital Learning has significantly lowered online training costs and increased training capacity because each trainer can teach up to 25 students for one flat rate. ‘We can now hold a training session whenever we want without worrying about scheduling or the cost,’ says Sandi Boggs, lead consultant in the company\'s advanced support group. Also, because the training team travels less frequently, travel expenses for the department have been cut substantially.
Without leaving their desks, the headquarters-based training team conducts regular product update sessions with small groups of the company\'s roughly 100 educational consultants. In turn, the educational consultants use the software from their homes to conduct what the company calls ‘connected training’ for thousands of customers in school districts all over the United States.
Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company with offices in London and Silicon Valley, published The Frost Report.
