How Can Technology Improve Your Employee Training?

Technology has radically transformed the way that businesses behave in a variety of different ways. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to identify an aspect of modern business that isn’t now approached differently because of technological advances. That’s why businesses who embrace technological solutions will fare better than those that don’t.

Employee training is no exception to this rule; technology provides businesses today with numerous tools that they can use to reduce the costs of providing employee training without sacrificing the quality. 

Standardised Systems

No matter what your business is or what you do, it is important that you take a considered approach to your IT. Many businesses neglect their IT and leave it as an afterthought, especially if their business isn’t particularly reliant on IT to perform its day to day functions. The problem with this is that even if your workers only have minimal interactions with your IT system, and the more confusing and archaic your systems are, the less intuitive they will be and the longer simple tasks will take to complete.

By standardising systems across your business, you minimise the amount of training that your workers need to start using your IT system. More importantly, the different departments of your business will find it so much easier to communicate and work with one another if they are all using the same system. Most business management software is designed to easily integrate with the systems that individual departments use. Picking the right systems for each department, and a centralised system to hold it all together, will make all your training quicker and easier.

Learn Remotely

There are some things that can only really be learned practically. For example, while you can find a lot of information online about how to drive a car, all that reading is no substitute for actually getting behind the wheel. However, there are definitely a great many useful and relevant skills that workers in any industry can learn remotely.

There are lots of resources out there for providing information to workers in various industries. These include government website pages, industry bodies and regulators, and higher education institutions, all of whom provide access to resources that can form a core part of your worker training.

On top of this, you can prepare your own resources and make them available online for your workers. This is an excellent way of disseminating information amongst your workforce. If your workers are required to earn a particular certification or license before they can begin working for you properly, you can put together packs of revision resources for them to make their training as straightforward as possible.

Discover New Opportunities

If your business has recently branched out into a new area and your workers now require a new type of certification, it’s easy to find a list of potential course providers and certifiers. For example, if you are looking for IPAF courses, then you can find a list of IPAF courses on findcourses.co.uk.

Unless you are able to bring your training and certification in-house, you should always look online when you need to provide new training. This will enable you to find the best provider for your needs, both in terms of the quality of the training they provide and the price they charge for it.

Learning Management Systems

A learning management system is an online platform that serves as a repository for any training materials that your business provides, as well as providing the tools that you and your workers need to track their progress and ensure that they are up to date with all their required training modules. Employees can then either use these systems on a kind of self-service basis, where they take responsibility for their own learning and training and are left to manage themselves, or you can take a more hands-on approach.

If the training is optional and you have made it available to enable your employees to improve themselves on their own time and at their own pace, it makes sense to take the hands-off approach to your LMS. You might find that workers are more willing to engage with the LMS and learn new skills if they are able to do it in private. Conversely, if they feel that management is going to be monitoring them as they learn new things, this can deter them from pursuing training opportunities.

If there is any training that your workers are legally required to undertake before they can work for you or take on certain tasks, an LMS is a great way of not only providing them with learning resources, but also of monitoring their progress and providing them with support when they need it.

If your LMS is going to be effective, then you first need to ensure that you have the most user-friendly platform possible. If you have the resources to develop your own platform in-house, this is a solid investment for the future of your business. Any business that routinely trains its employees, or sends them elsewhere to undertake training, can streamline the process and give their workers a better chance at success by offering access to an LMS.

Simulations and Interactive Learning

Simulations have come a very long way over the last few decades; their evolution makes for a truly fascinating story. Now that realistic graphics are so easily available to anyone with a moderately powerful computer, digital simulators have become considerably more complex and more useful. The kind of expensive simulation software that would have once come as a standalone unit and cost an eye-watering amount of money is now available in the form of video games. Microsoft’s next version of its fabled Flight Simulator is pushing all kinds of boundaries when it comes to the home simulator experience.

Simulations aren’t ideal for everything, but for certain kinds of training, they are an invaluable tool. It is worth checking out what simulator options are available for your industry; you might be surprised by the range of what is available.

For those situations where a simulator doesn’t exist or isn’t appropriate, there are a number of interactive learning resources that you can turn to instead. Making learning interactive is a very effective way of making lessons stick that would otherwise have been forgotten. The simple fact that we are interacting with the resources in front of us improves our ability to recall the information later. This is why writing things down and taking notes is a more useful way of revising than just reading things over and over again.

There are numerous ways that technology has made it easier and cheaper to train workers in a variety of skills and disciplines. For many businesses, employee training is integral to what they do and it is essential that they are able to meet the logistical and financial requirem will not only empower your workers to take control of their own training, but it will also enable you to provide oversight and guidance to them.