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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 as needed, 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 marketplace. 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, informationspecific 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. Reactive training requires that trainers be empowered to meet their constituents' needs on demand, quickly, easily and cost effectively. It also requires more interactive approaches, so that employees can get a truly customized experience.
EMPOWERING CORPORATE TRAINERS***
Just as businesses need to be especially agile in today's marketplace, so, too, do corporate trainers. This makes it particularly important to empower trainers on the front lines, so that they can quickly react to their constituents' training needs, regardless of the type or size of the request. Giving trainers the tools and technologies to help them be effective teachers ensures that employees' training needs will be met – and, therefore, that those employees will be knowledgeable and up to speed on the latest business technologies and techniques.
EXTENDING TRAINING'S REACH
As companies become more global, they have an ever-increasing base of remote workers to train. These workers may be spread out across regions, countries and even continents, and operate in a variety of time zones. They also may speak different languages and have regionally or culturally specific training needs. Plus, because they are less connected to their co-workers and managers, remote employees have less opportunity for ad hoc training from peers or experts; that means the corporate training they receive must be especially accessible and thorough. At the same time, it must be cost effective and boost employee productivity as much as possible, before and after the training event.
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