The significance of corporate training for any organization is invaluable. It not only provides employees with the latest and up-to-date knowledge but equips them with tools and resources that pertain to the business. Training in a corporation serves to increase the efficiency of the employees, so the business operations benefit from it. It can indefinitely be said that the future of corporate training lies with E-learning.
The concept of E-learning has been around for some time now, but the recent advances and expansion in the area have been unprecedented. The spread of Covid-19 played a role in promoting different organizations to use E-learning for corporate training as work-from-home policies prevailed across the world. But, it is the usefulness and benefits that E-learning provides that hooked businesses onto the utility.
The Problems With the Classroom Approach
The challenges and drawbacks that come along with the use of conventional classroom training are aplenty. The corporate management has to conduct training sessions and workshops (especially for unconventional shift workers), and employees having to manage and handle the high amount of information thrown their way in a single class are tedious and demanding tasks. Researches have also shown that traditional ways of corporate training can inflict a blow to the learning retention rate of the individuals while retention rate can increase between 25% to 60% with the use of E-learning strategies.
Coordination of employees gathering in one space for a training session is a task, and the productivity rate of those employees for that period of time is small. There are people who do not know the basics of the topic being instructed, and there are people who already know what is being taught and want to get on with it. The educator has to take every participant’s learning speed into consideration and pace their lecture accordingly. Online learning, on the other hand, can be customized for each individual to make sure it is beyond their current understanding of the topic, and everyone can learn at their own pace. There is a higher room for incorporating interactive components that makes the process interesting, making learning more efficient. For these reasons and many others, the future of corporate training is nothing but E-learning.
The Importance of E-learning in Corporate Training
Training is agile and has room for expansion. It allows deployment in real-time and offers adaptive, role-based training for different teams and individuals. The employees have the ease of taking on learning at their own comfort from wherever they are and whenever they have the time. Researches have shown that the retention of material through online learning is much greater as compared to the traditional classroom methods. E-learning employs consistent delivery of education, and employees can repeat the instructions and review the data as often as they want to for better understanding.
Cost-Effective
Hiring an instructor for every class used to be the norm. But now, with E-learning, you can reuse the coursework and modify and scale it as you like. This low-cost training methodology saves you from shutting down departments so the members can take part in corporate training sessions, keeping the productivity consistent. The organizations can also forego the costs of the resources, such as transportation and facilities needed for conducting training workshops.
A study indicated that there are three factors that contribute to effective learning. The training event itself, the preparedness of an individual, and follow-up activities. It also assigns the factors percentages in terms of the rate of their effectiveness, which are 25%, 25%, and 50%, respectively. The events before the learning session receive an average of 10% of the training budget, and post events are assigned only 5% by the companies in the United States. 85% of the training budgets are not introduced to any of the three effective factors.
There are many e-learning options for small companies that in the past could not implement or afford a Learning Management System. For example, there are LMS systems on the market, such as Axis LMS, that have tiers for small companies with limited budgets.
The modern business landscape has a requirement of instruction-on-demand, and online learning offers exactly that to it. IBM saved $200 million (approx.) by ditching the outdated training methods and switching to E-learning.
Targeted
Employees from different departments and different backgrounds often need customized ways of learning. Through online learning, you can target every team, group, and department with performance-supporting content in ways that are relevant to them. There is room in E-learning for implementation for digital strategies that have the ability to improve learning interventions. Another reason why E-learning is the future of corporate training is that it is translatable and adaptable for the localized needs of different employees.
Agile
According to different researches, a traditional classroom setting can require up to 40% to 60% more time from employees to learn a piece of material than online learning does. With the fast-paced acceleration with which corporate advancement is taking place, learning and development need to keep up. By curating and creating programs that cater to different aspects, you can deliver performance-enhancing solutions to your employees and keep them from going into unnecessary and non-related areas. The Covid-19 pandemic reiterated the need for agility for organizations by proving that companies that are able to shift and introduce redesigned strategies and adopt technological roll-outs within no time are the ones who embrace success and progress in difficult times.
To stay ahead in the market competition and battle corporate challenges effectively, organizations need to be agile in their corporate training approach. By developing training content through iterative and short cycles, a business can increase the employees’ skills without wasting any time. The relevancy of the content, solution to the latest competitive challenges, and accommodation of new market dynamics are necessary and possible only through web-based learning programs.
Feedback and Collaboration
Businesses that have a culture of collaboration among workers can benefit from its enhancement with the use of E-learning. By creating interactive and collaborative apps or web platforms for employees for online learning, teamwork and coordination also receive a positive impact along with an increase in their knowledge. Many individuals refrain from providing feedback about the conventional training sessions as their interest in them is low. By incorporating feedback channels, like forms or comments sections where the employees access the informational material, organizations can ask for feedback, reservations, and the employee training experience. It can help corporations to make the platform, material, and process more simple, efficient, and interesting for the learners.
Global Accessibility
The organization that either has multiple branches across the globe or have outsourced their business processes to another country can benefit from the global accessibility feature of online learning. All the employees, no matter where they are, can learn the same material and get re-skilled simultaneously. Re-location is also one of the many offerings of E-learning, and employees can reclaim and retain their lifestyle without hindering their professional life and goals. Organizations can spread a network of career advancement programs through the web that can benefit global learners.
Variety
The future of corporate training lies in the ability of individuals to equip themselves with vast knowledge in a variety of areas. Until a few years back, when E-learning had not spread as it has now, employees were limited to skills pertaining to their areas of study. Online training gave them access to the knowledge of a number of topics they can equip themselves with and expand their careers. In order to succeed and flourish, employees can tackle a limitless choice of subjects to showcase their skills, and organizations can create specialized programs and track program completions of all of their employees.
Employee Utility
E.learning does not just make corporate training easy and efficient for Learning and Development teams and businesses but offers utility and ease to the employees as well. Through simple processes and flexibility, employees can benefit from online learning without losing interest. All or groups of employees cannot be looked at collectively, and E-learning allows the workers to schedule their learning and prioritize their topics as per their needs and ease.
The life demands, the pace of acquiring knowledge, and the learning methodologies of all individuals differ. Non-traditional learners can move ahead with learning at their own pace and momentum with online learning. These utility factors motivate the learners to advance their skills and consequently benefit their personal lives as well as the organizations they work for. 43% of organizations have seen an increase in their income by applying E-learning methodologies.
Tools and Resources
Someone once said, ‘Technology is like a tree, and it always branches out.’ The information stored on the internet is ever-increasing, and so is the innovation and creation of new tools and resources. Like all other fields, the online learning industry is also experiencing a technological boom at a fast pace. The E-learning industry is expected to hit the $325 billion mark by 2025, according to Forbes, and there is no estimate as to how many more advanced and useful tools the future of corporate learning will embrace. Unlike physical training that can only employ a limited number of techniques, E-learning, especially through a tool such as a Learning Management System, can bring into its service a huge amount of tools and resources to make the process of corporate training more adaptive, personalized, creative, innovative, and interactive.
There is always room for more software, technologies, and applications to aid and enhance E-learning. Augmented reality and virtual reality is a prominent trend that allows organizations to train their workers with emotional control. It is especially effective for employees that are getting trained for performing risky physical activities as they can perform and practice various physical tasks, understanding and experience their true impact in a safe environment. According to Zion Market research, the global E-learning virtual reality market can reach $1,478 million by 2027.
Gamification does what sports and physical games used to do before it was introduced but in a time-saving manner. It provides high levels of employee engagement and improves team spirit. Participants enjoy learning as it is not monotonous and get a sense of achievement through the process, which additionally supports in creating a healthier work environment.
More and more applications and software are getting introduced with more modern and updated features. Employers can access liberties, customize and integrate training material, manage users, obtain and create relevant reports, perform in-depth analysis, monitor data, evaluate effectiveness, track competencies and compliance, provide information 24/7, and enhance communication and relationship with their employees, all on a single mobile-based, free of cost application. By leveraging futuristic technologies, corporate training and learning are moving towards near real-life experiences and practicality.
The Future of Corporate Training
Organizations with comprehensive training programs enjoy 218% higher revenue for each of their employees and have 24% higher profit margins, a survey of 2,500 companies found.
By incorporating the most modern and latest trends in their training efforts, organizations can get better business outcomes and obtain behavioral changes through growth in knowledge. The learning and development departments have the utility to tailor the courses and material to make it serve the specific requirements of the employees. And, as time passes and brings a need to modify the material, they can ensure improvement and upgrades of the system and its content.
Individuals nowadays want, demand, and expect learning through methods that offer utility and liberty to them. Employee development is something that is not only for the employers to benefit from, but the employees as well. An ideal learning environment that online learning offers is the best and most utility-offering domain of web-based corporate training. It is cost-effective and results getting for the employers and career uplifting for the employees.
The methodology has produced dramatic results for several organizations as it provides a competitive market edge to businesses that utilize it. With an expanded range of educational scenarios and mass personalization, the future of corporate training is in the secure hands of E-learning.