Smart training for smart working companies: advantages of eLearning

With the spread of smart working, it becomes essential for companies to transform training to adapt it to the new ways of working and make it employee-friendly: in this article we will find which digitalfeatures makes eLearning a trump card for Human Resources and managers. 

TRAINING IN THE TIME OF SMART WORKING 

Smart working has moved workers from company headquarters to personal houses, coffee shops, coworking spaces and more or less temporary working stations. When we talk about “smart” working, we refer to high levels of flexibility, both in space and time, but also to a new approach: activities aim to achieve objectives and results, making employees more responsible for their work.  

What does this mean for training? Being employees physically distant, and sometimes working at different times, it becomes more difficult to organize training and to motivate employees to attend courses and lessons. This is why training needs to become more and more smart, to come closer to users’ habits in life and work: not only live training (face-to-face or in webinars), but mostly blended programs that allow students to choose when and where to learn, always keeping the same goals, organized in pills and available also on mobile devices.  

CORPORATE TRAINING FOR HR AND MANAGERS 

Training within companies can be of two types: mandatory, as such the one related to work health and safety, or part of an instructional project built based on the specific needs of employees.  

In this last case, in particular, the HR Training Manager organizes courses and lessons to solve real problems more or less immediately: to instruct employees about specific company procedures or policies, to improve their soft skills or to enhance their abilities. To this end, it becomes essential to avoid having to repeat the same course over time – if not for recurring reviews or updates – building a coherent and effective project. 

On the other hand, managers need to measure the value of training in economic terms: training becomes a tool to improve performance, but it cannot be a source of distraction from the company core business to employees. 

ADVANTAGES OF ELEARNING FOR COMPANIES

We have already talked about different ways to evaluate the effectiveness of training. Digital training, in particular thanks to the distance tracking feature of LMS platforms and SCORM packages, seem to offer many useful data, both related to the achievement of learning goals and return on investment. 

All the reports – with login data, partial and final results, activity history and much more – allow HR and managers to have an overview of progresses, to be able to evaluate how good the running training project is and issue, when needed, certificates of attendance or passing. 

In addition, talking about the investment value, digital training has the advantage of reusing materials and resources in many occasions, in particular asynchronous resources like videos, presentations and SCORM packages, and of making changes only and exclusively on the needed content portions. This is particularly useful when training is related to onboarding, namely targeting all the new employees, but also to all those topics that require recurring updates, as such the ones related to specific policies and procedures.  

It cannot be denied that changes in working habits, and in particular the spread of smart working, deeply affect corporate training dynamics. 

Are you interested in understanding which competencies are required from a company that decides to turn to eLearning? Read our following articles. 

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