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Today's trainers are looking for a fresh approach to online training that lets them launch sessions easily, both proactively (in advance of learning) and reactively (as an educational need comes up). They need interactive online tools that let them deliver and collect feedback, tools that are simple to use for both instructors and attendees. And, always, they need to keep their eye on costs, because even as the need for training rises the budgets for doing so are often on the decline.
Citrix Online, a division of Citrix Systems, Inc., is a leading provider of remote access and Web collaboration services. Citrix® GoToMeeting™ Corporate, with the new Citrix GoToWebinar , stands out among the many Web collaboration solutions available today for its ease of use, cost-effectiveness and unique collaboration and real-time monitoring capabilities. Motivated by a "simpler is better" philosophy and a flat-fee, All You Can Meet™ licensing model, GoToMeeting Corporate delivers hosted online meeting and event services designed to help customers achieve their business goals through improved collaboration. This paper examines the key challenges faced by today's corporate training organizations, and how GoToMeeting Corporate is delivering the right tools to help businesses meet their growth and educational objectives.
KEY COMMUNICATION CHALLENGES FOR CORPORATE TRAINING ORGANIZATIONS
When asked to define what concerns them most, IT executives top-rank the need to keep an expanding global workforce educated and informed. Add to that increased competition, pressure to cap costs and rapidly changing markets, and you have a critical need to train employees as efficiently as possible. Corporate training success requires insightful, relevant classes that engage attendees while ensuring their training needs are met. It's critical to be able to catch an employee's attention, keep it, and then make sure that the information imparted is understood and retained. It's also important that corporate trainers be able to offer refresher courses and follow-up classes on an at-need basis, to ensure employees remain up to date on the latest information. What's more, like all learning, corporate training greatly benefits from increased collaboration.
Training Teams Require New Models for Success
The traditional training model no longer works in our increasingly global world. Today's training organizations must educate a rapidly changing, dispersed workforce whose tools and technologies are rapidly changing as well. Trainers and their managers must therefore design new ways to effectively reach their audiences, melding emerging technologies and techniques with highly targeted educational environments. In doing so, they're moving away from the conventional proactive approach-design, advertise, educate, test-to a more reactive model in which training professionals engage in a collaborative learning process with employees, customers and partners.
Modern training organizations face several complex challenges, including the need to:
- Increase training reach across multiple time zones, so employees are up to speed no matter where they're located;
- Extend their reach to geographically dispersed partners and customers while reducing training costs;
- Create highly targeted and interactive educational sessions that engage attendees; - Provide a collaborative training process in which employees can offer feedback and interact with training professionals to get answers to questions and support their business needs;
- Lay the educational foundation, then follow up with targeted, information-specific training as needed;
- Empower corporate trainers and foster communication among them and their managers;
- Maximize efficiency to train more people more quickly.
Proactive and Reactive Opportunities
Traditional training is proactive. That is, trainers evaluate where education is needed, set up appropriate sessions and opportunities, invite the required attendees and teach accordingly. Proactive training is critical in certain situations-for instance, when new technology is introduced, or when details on new products or sales techniques must be mastered by employees. Proactive training is also a great way to introduce partners and customers to new information related to their relationships and purchases. It generally involves one-way information sharing, with limited audience participation, but polling, Q & A, and other ways of gauging the audience's attention and engagement can be very effective.
But today's fast-moving business environment also requires reactive training-the ability to respond to educational needs and requests on the fly. These requests may arise after a proactive training session has been conducted, if attendees have questions or desire follow-up; or they may come independent of proactive training, as employees seek expertise and skills during the course of their regular business performance
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