For this purpose, your best bet is to create online training for employees. Online training can provide your employees with the quickest and most-effective methods for building their skill-sets. If you are interested in creating an eLearning platform to improve your employee training, here’s everything you need to know:
What Is Online Training?
Online training is a form of education that can be accessed and delivered over the Internet for business development purposes. Companies are looking to create online training for employees to make sure that their employees have the necessary skills required for carrying out their jobs properly, which eventually helps change the way companies develop and evolve.
Why Go for Online Training?
For those companies that have adopted online learning, the outcomes can be quite positive. IBM conducted a study that found that every $1 invested in online training generates around $30 worth of productivity. This is excellent news for organizations of any size and industry.
Going from an offline classroom to an online learning platform to train employees is more advantageous than you think. Here are some of the benefits it offers.
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Provides an excellent return on investment.
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Makes learning more convenient and flexible.
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The quality of content is standardized and consistent.
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Improves employee retention rates by more than 50%.
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Offers a competitive edge to organizations through up-to-date knowledge.
Create Online Training for Employees
Your need a solid plan to create online training for employees. For starters, you can consider the following steps.
1. Prepare Learning Goals and Work on Content Creation
You may use the following ideas to prepare your training goals.
Employee Training Requirements
Determine the areas where your employees lack and assess their needs. You can delegate this responsibility to the human resource department who can conduct appraisals and engage in other forms of contact.
Focus on a plan that could assist them in sharpening their skills as well as meet your training targets. Although some of the training subjects are going to be common for all employees, particularly when they have job responsibilities, it’s vital to analyze each employee’s learning journey separately.
Brainstorm what the training content needs to include and specify the learning objectives and goals for each training session. Next, create your training material to conform to your learning activities.
Going forward, consider how much interactive your training content needs to be. You can enhance interactivity via multimedia – embed audio/video, create presentations, and add text and images to your course.
In order to add more sophisticated, advanced, and complex learning units to your online employee training, such as an interactive video, you will require certain compatible tools that a learning management system supports, including HTM, SCORM, and Tin Can.
Logistics
Decide how long the online training will last? Is one hour enough? Does it need to be one day? Set deadlines and timescales on the completion of the course.
Subsequently, determine your employee’s learning environment. For instance, if your team works remotely and you want them to collaborate, an LMS with audio/video conferencing would work wonders. Similarly, get an LMS that provides you with the functionality to conduct real-time webinars in an eLearning setting, similar to a virtual classroom.
If you want to create online training for employees where the educational content is quiz-based and comprises questionnaires, all you need to do is to give your employees user logins. In this way, they can access and learn the training material from the comfort of their homes. This form of education is also known as asynchronous learning.
Training Content Creation
After you have made your mind about the course’s training goals and training mechanism, your next course of action should be to proceed with content creation. A great deal of planning and investment goes into the development of an online training course. You will have to follow these steps:
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Choose the course topic.
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Research the subject matter in detail.
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Devise the course outline.
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Begin with content creation.
Training Costs
Each online course platform or learning management system has its own price-tag. The price for an employee-oriented training course depends on multiple factors, including but not limited to, the number of users, licenses, seats, and the type of features it contains.
It would serve you well if you can calculate the number of your employees and find how many licenses and seats will be needed. This will allow you to get a suitable pricing plan and prevent overspending.
Some LMS may charge you in terms of a subscription while others charge by active users, so you need to keep these considerations in mind.
2. Select the Best Training Software
After you are done with figuring out your learning goals, it’s time to set off on your quest to find the best online training software that can cater to your needs to the letter.
An online course platform or an LMS is often considered a feasible solution for training users in a corporate environment. These options can help you to boost employee performance, satisfaction, and engagement, thereby contributing to the generation of additional revenue for your organization.
During your search for an online course platform or a learning management system, it’s integral to make sure that they contain all those features that you prefer for your employees. This step plays a pivotal role in maximizing the impact of your corporate training.
If you plan to create online training for employees with an LMS, the following capabilities must be a part of your solution.
Mobile Learning
Enable your employees to access online training from any time at any place via tablets, smartphones, and other compact gadgets.
A continuous and user-friendly mobile learning experience is highly regarded by enthusiastic students. Industries, such as hospitality, where the employees need to use their mobiles at work can especially benefit a great deal from this form of learning.
Social Learning
Your employees would enjoy social assessment opportunities. Many users value the capability to share user-generated content.
For instance, you can build a community where your employees can learn from each other and compete through chat rooms, group discussions, and other peer-to-peer activities. Over time, these discussions will help employees to learn about complex topics from their colleagues.
Content Customization
Develop distinct, relevant, and personalized learning paths for your employees and teams and oversee training materials, according to your organization’s requirements. Customization can go as far as allowing you to adjust the design of the learning environment, such as modifying the dashboards or adding/removing specific elements on the login page. For instance, you can make sure that only those employees can register for a course that belongs to a certain department.
Gamification
Integrate gaming mechanics to motivate your employees. You can do this by using interactive learning e.g., contests, leaderboards, awards, and badges. Incentives can also help you to improve the confidence of your employees and get them in the limelight.
According to research, gamified online learning can lead to enhanced employee performance in assessments and better retention rates.
Intuitive User Interface
Design a contemporary and uncomplicated UI that is up-to-date with the latest technological trends to produce a user experience that’s easy-to-use, creative, and fun. An effective UI design can expand user engagement to a considerable extent.
Instructor-Led Classroom
When you create online training for employees, the prospect of conducting instructor-led classroom training is a big plus. Activities from this type of online learning can ensure that you provide effective and reliable training to your employees.
Rich Multimedia
Incorporate different content formats into your learning to create online training for employees. This can include text, images, and videos – webinars, screencasts, and recordings. Similarly, make sure your corporate training is compatible with video files, Google Docs, PDF, HTML, and SCORM packages. The greater the interactivity, the more efficient your course becomes.
Convenient Setup
Make sure that starting and completing your online training course is convenient. Nowadays, the ideal method to create online training for employees that is easy-to-use and fast is by opting for a cloud-powered learning management system, particularly one that can handle large amounts of traffic.
Reporting Capabilities
Your training must focus on generating reports on online training activity, course progression, scores, and the completion rates of your users.
An in-depth reporting capability of how your employees are learning can provide the HR department with critical information about their performances. It also enables you to monitor and evaluate the performance of their training program.
Third-Party Integrations
Offer the capability to link various applications, systems, and software via third-party services, so they can improve the quality of your online corporate training.
In many cases, e-commerce integrations can generate greater value for your online training by letting you promote training like Google Analytics, HRIS system, and CRM.
Some LMS options provide these elements to a certain extent, providing a personalized training tool. Keep in mind that most of the LMS are expensive and many don’t offer the flexibility that you require to create online training for employees.
When it becomes tougher to choose from multiple LMS, lean towards one that is more cost-effective, boasts innovative technology, and carries enough potential to provide the best possible online corporate training.
3. Get Employee Feedback
After you have chosen an LMS that addresses your requirements, empower your employees by having them test it. Since your employees are the ones who are eventually going to use it for learning, their feedback must be used for the development of your online training program. If your employees aren’t satisfied, there’s no reason to go ahead with that strategy because it would be extremely hard to capture their interest after that. This is why it’s recommended to discuss matters with your employees throughout the whole process of creating an online corporate training course.
Whenever user feedback is needed, surveys are often considered as the best option to collect the relevant suggestions. You could use the survey to send inquiries to your employees that ask them about their opinions on the current training program. For instance, it can comprise the following questions:
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How would you describe this program in one word?
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What are the best features?
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What would you like to improve about the program?
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On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the course content?
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Was the user experience the same on multiple screens?
You can ask several questions but start with the most important ones that can improve your training.
Next, evaluate how much your employees were able to learn from the training course via real-life examples. In this way, you can identify critical gaps in your training content.
The ability to modify the content quickly and easily and incorporate suitable changes while creating the training program offers a tremendous advantage.
Final Thoughts
Going ahead with an online corporate program for your organization may seem intimidating at first. However, following this guide can ensure that you create online training for employees with optimal success.
