Forget in-person corporate training sessions that pull employees away from work for hours or days at a time. Today, more businesses are investing in web-based training solutions that are flexible, scalable, and often even mobile.
Integrating online video into accessible learning management systems is now the approach of choice for most corporate training. It gives employees 24-hour access to training on their work computer, mobile phone, or tablet. Video keeps employees engaged in learning, but if something pressing comes up, they can always hit the pause button.
With the business world changing at a breakneck pace, businesses need an approach to employee learning that can help them stay ahead of the curve.
What Web-Based Training Can Do for Your Business
Asking employees to take hours, days, or weeks away from their work for in-person training simply isn’t feasible for many businesses. Efficiency drops, and employees end up stressed and distracted by the work that isn’t getting done in their absence.
Make it Affordable
The complexity and cost of coordinating in-person training — instructors, locations, food, lodging, scheduling conflicts — means that they may only happen a few times a year. Meanwhile, technology and the business environment is evolving rapidly. An in-service day every six months just isn’t going to cut it.
Web-based learning approaches save time and money over the long-term. Instead of hiring a trainer to come in once or twice a year, you can buy the course or learning platform once. Any additional investment goes into creating new and updated lessons, while reusing the core elements that stay relatively constant.
Enhance productivity
With web-based options, employees can train without being pulled away from their projects, tasks, and clients. And corporate training is about more than skill-building for the job employees have now. Training for career development helps businesses retain employees, attract qualified talent, and achieve their overall business goals.
Most businesses today use a mix of externally created and internally created elearning content. That means they may license a course or purchase a Learning Management System with built-in capabilities, then customize their own videos or text to represent their brand and internal processes.
Improve Consistency
Plus, what happens when you have multiple locations? What happens if your business is national or even global? You could pay an instructor to travel to each location and give the same training, which quickly gets expensive or hire instructors at each location, with no guarantee everyone will get the same training.
Or you can provide the same online training module to every employee in every location. This eliminates surprises and makes sure your trainees are all learning the same information.
What Employees Get Out of Web-Based Training
While businesses certainly benefit from replacing some, or all, in-person learning with web-based training, the real winners are the employees. Here are five ways that web-based training improves the employee experience — making employees happier, less stressed, and more capable.
1. Control Over The Pace of Learning
People learn at different rates. Web-learning means employees are not held back by a colleague who wants to take more time on a subject. And that colleague doesn’t have to feel self-conscious about taking some extra time to learn something. They’re free to learn French at their own pace or take time away from their coding lessons whenever they want.
2. Unlimited Access to Training Materials
With video training sessions, course content, and even quizzes available on-demand, employees can engage when it fits their schedule. They can watch a video lecture while they clean their office, read a chapter while riding the bus to work, or take a quiz in between client meetings.
Mobile-enabled learning is even more flexible. You can deliver the same training videos and learning experience directly to employee mobile devices. With the average US adult spending more than 4.5 hours per day on their smartphone, mobile-accessible corporate training just makes sense.
3. Just-In-Time Learning Opportunities
The always accessible nature of web-based training makes just-in-time learning possible. Employees can quickly learn new skills when they need them. For example, they can watch a three-minute training video on sales tactics before an important meeting, or brush up on essential compliance topics before reviewing a report.
This microcourse style of content delivery was almost impossible with traditional corporate training. At best, employees might have been able to flip through an employee handbook or search through old emails to find relevant information. With an online learning management system they can find the lesson they need, watch an interactive video, and immediately check their understanding with on-screen questions.
4. Better Information Retention
The truth is that eLearning often delivers better results than in-person training. Partly, this is because well-designed online learning includes a mix of tools and technologies not always available in traditional training sessions.
Online training also mirrors the academic experience of many millennials and post-millenials. In 2022, 54% of college students took at least one course online. That doesn’t even include all of the Khan Academy, Udemy, EdX, Masterclass…and other online courses they might access on their own.
Several studies have shown that students in classes with a traditional “stand and deliver” lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes with a more active learning style.
“It’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have this data,” Eric Mazur told Science Magazine. Mazur is a physicist at Harvard University who has fought against stale lecturing techniques for decades. With online learning tools at your disposal, there’s no reason to subject employees to droning slide presentations that may not be effective.
Hybrid Learning Models
With all the benefits of online corporate training you might think it’s time to get rid of face-to-face training entirely. Not so fast. Traditional teaching still has its place. It’s perfect for hands-on training that can’t be replicated in a computer simulation. If applied thoughtfully, it can also help employees build relationships and strengthen teams.
The best solution may be to combine e-learning and traditional instruction into a hybrid learning model. Choose e-learning for courses that need to be easily replicated, for just-in-time learning, and for courses that would be time-consuming in person. Augment those with in-person sessions for hands-on training, team building, and more personalized topics.
Ready for Web-Based Training? Start Here
Learning management systems are becoming more user-friendly, more mobile accessible, and more cost effective than ever. If your organization hasn’t already embraced web-based learning, now is the time. See this shift for what it is, an investment in the future.
The backbone of any high-quality online corporate training program is instructional videos. Whether you’re recording mini-lectures, crafting step-by-step tutorials, or creating custom animations to aid employee understanding, the video experts at IdeaRocket can help.
