How To Successfully Kick Off Your Online Training Project
No business leader would dispute the notion that talented employees are critical to success. Organizations that can identify and recruit the best candidates earn a serious competitive advantage.
Yet getting great people in the door is only the beginning since it's also essential to cultivate their skills. If you can attract qualified people, nurture their skills and put them in the best position to succeed, you're on your way to building a high-quality, self-renewing talent base.
Online training plays a primary role in this process, as it offers myriad powerful benefits over conventional classroom-based instruction. Learners can access material when and where it best suits them. Course designers can build visually arresting, immersive, and interactive instructional materials. Businesses can scale up their training program, increase efficiency and lower costs.
There's just one catch: To realize all of those advantages, it's imperative that organizations follow best practices when implementing an online training initiative. Failure to plan, and poor execution can result in a training program that fails to maximize its full potential.
With that in mind, let's review some guidelines for successfully kicking off your online training project.
1. Recognize The Importance Of Planning And Due Diligence
Much like with any significant corporate undertaking, the seed for the eventual success of an online training initiative is planted during the planning process. Businesses must interrogate their organizational objectives and conduct a rigorous examination of any variables or circumstances that could affect the outcome of the project.
Here are a few core questions to ask during this process:
- What limitations are imposed by our current training structure?
- How will online training help our employees achieve specific tasks or goals that are currently out of reach?
- Where are the "skills gaps" in our company? Do we need to cultivate hard skills? Soft skills?
- How can online training be used to resolve these skills gaps?
- How should we prioritize our training goals? What's most important to the overall success of the organization?
- How should training be structured?
By reviewing questions such as these, organizations can help ensure that they have done the groundwork to make a new training project successful. Once the planning stage has concluded, it's time to consider the right tool to help you implement your vision.
2. Find The Right Technology Partner
Now that you have strategic objectives in place, it's time to weigh your options about online training content creation and deployment. A wide selection of online Learning Management Systems is available today. These platforms offer the most comprehensive, powerful, full-featured approach to online training. The trick is to find the one that suits your needs most.
With the right technology, organizations can create detailed interactive training courses, manage user activity, and monitor learner progress. Organizations can make their training materials vastly more accessible, as learners can log on and complete work whenever it suits them. This, in turn, helps employees complete more training courses and better retain the material they've learned.
An LMS also makes the training process far more engaging. Instead of meeting in a conference room and consuming static content, workers interact with the material being presented. Instead of having to sit through the material with which they're already familiar, they can focus on the most relevant information.
It's important to understand that every LMS is not created equal, however. Choosing the right platform is another key step in establishing a successful training project.
Some of the most important attributes to look for in an LMS include:
- A cloud-based setup.
The creation of a hosted setup can lead to extraordinary development costs. Choosing a cloud-based platform eliminates the potential for those costs and the headaches that go along with development, implementation, and maintenance. - Mobile optimization.
Today's learners live and work on their mobile devices. By investing in a system with robust mobile features, you can provide learners with added accessibility and flexibility. - Strong social functionality.
Platforms that facilitate text messaging, group discussions, and other social actions help spark collaboration and a spirit of communal inquiry. - Interactive feedback.
Real-time polling options can help instructors make sure that all learners remain on target. - High-quality audio and video.
The ability to handle multiple high-quality video streams helps ensure that the learning process is a seamless one. - A focus on user experience.
Learners will quickly become disengaged if the experience of using technology is tedious or buggy. The right LMS should be designed with an emphasis on user experience. - Advanced tracking and reporting.
This helps make management and administration of training programs vastly easier than with conventional classroom-based approaches.
Finding the Learning Management System that best suits the specific needs of an organization is critically important. Once businesses have made the appropriate choice, they can move on to the next step: Creation of compelling content.
3. Engage Workers Through Great Content
The most diligent planning and the best technology can only take you so far without excellent content. It is important to put yourself into the shoes of learners to grab the attention of learners, and keep them involved and invested in the training process.
To make your training materials as compelling as possible, consider the following:
- The use of storytelling.
Humans are natural storytellers, and also love hearing stories. By placing content in a narrative context, you play into our innate appreciation of this format. - Scenario-based instruction.
Placing problems in a real-world context can help learners quickly grasp the issue. - Gamification.
People love games just as much as they love stories. By incorporating gamification elements, you can leverage this inclination and also tap into the positive response we all feel when earning an award or accomplishing a task. - Keep it short and sweet.
Remember, brevity is the soul of wit. It's also the key to compelling content creation. Learners disengage when the material is long-winded. Present your information in short, digestible chunks. - Leverage the power of your LMS.
Take full advantage of video and audio capabilities, social functions, etc.
By focusing on the creation of smart, compelling content, you can help make sure that learners stay focused and engaged. Course completion rates will rise, and employees will be eager to engage in continuous learning and skill development.
The Takeaway
Online training is a powerful tool that can transform how your organization approaches Learning and Development. To ensure that your project is successful, please carefully consider the ideas outlined above before getting started.