Top 3 Challenges Of Telecommunications Training Today
Rolling out training to a whole organization, or even a team, isn’t as simple as gathering everyone in a room for workshops. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the biggest challenges in detail. Understanding them will help you plan your training strategy to meet the needs of your organization and stay competitive.
Challenge #1: Market Consolidation
As technology advances, service providers are faced with the demand for repositioning. In doing so, many telecom companies are engaging in mergers and acquisitions. The result is larger teams, often spread across a geographically diverse area.
Integrating other service providers into your organization means you’ll need training around the changes in your products or services. Joining forces with another organization also often means expanding your teams. Faced now with virtual teams across large distances—or even across borders—can make rolling out training even more difficult.
Consider major telecommunications conglomerates like AT&T Inc., Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp, Verizon Communications Inc., or Vodafone Group. They’ve each grown to have hundreds of subsidiaries spread around the world and hundreds of thousands of employees.
When organizations merge or are acquired, a simple one-off traditional classroom training isn’t feasible. Bringing people up to speed with every new change is difficult. Not to mention doing so across time zones, cultures, and departments. The collaborations happening within the industry make designing a useful training strategy more complex than in some other sectors.
Challenge #2: Customer Turnover
As technology and trends in communication progress, customers are always looking for their best options. Constant evolution also means the potential for constant customer turnover. The challenge is keeping your training up to date and getting it out to your whole organization.
Telecom training has to keep up with the changes in customer interests and needs. Your company wants to create a smooth customer experience and boost customer retention. That means coordinating training on new products and processes. It also means training your employees on the skills that affect how they interact with customers. This is not a one-off experience.
But frequent training sessions can be difficult to coordinate across the organization. Keeping employees at all levels of the organization apprised of the latest changes and trends that customers care about faces several difficulties:
First, rolling out training on such a large scale and across locations can be both expensive and hard to coordinate. Second, training will look a little different for every department. You’ll need to focus on that department’s role and what their customer interactions look like. Finally, finding time for training across departments is difficult given each role’s different focus and busy schedules.
Traditional classroom training involves travel and taking time away from work and from helping customers. It’s also difficult to coordinate content that will speak to how changes will affect every role and communicate that in an in-person workshop setting
Challenge #3: The Need For Constant Upskilling
As mentioned earlier, the one thing you can count on to stay the same in telecommunications is change. Emerging high-tech products and services, like 5G, wearables, smart devices, and the pervasiveness of the IoT, challenge employees to keep up with their technical skills.
In addition, the global nature of the industry can call for frequent upgrades in cultural and communication skills as employees are working more and more internationally. The constant changes call for new processes, policies, tools, and tech. In one recent survey, the majority of telecom employees report seeing such effects rolled out frequently.
- 26% say they see such changes weekly
- 22% say they’re a monthly occurrence
- 20% see new processes, policies, or tech rolled out quarterly
The sheer logistics of rolling out training often enough to keep employees up to speed on these changes can be staggering. Coordinating a time that works across busy and diverse employee schedules is difficult to achieve with any kind of frequency. Less frequent training would require teaching more information in each session.
But when too much information is presented in one lesson or when very complex information is disseminated quickly, learning and retention suffer.
Conclusion
Telecom faces the challenge of delivering frequent training in a way that is accessible to all employees and that helps boost retention. A difficult challenge, but not impossible.
Download the eBook The Role Of eLearning In The Telecom Industry to learn how to launch an L&D strategy that boosts performance and supports your telecommuting telecom teams!
References:
- 2019 Employee Workplace Trends Learning & Development Report
- Make your eLearning stick: 8 tips & techniques for learning retention
