The Future of Workforce Training
As we look past the pandemic, organizations could be facing serious trouble as they confront the challenges ahead. Only about 36% of companies believe they are prepared to develop the skills they will need in the future. There are a few reasons for this, but the main three are that companies simply don’t know what those skills are, their learning strategies are not designed to meet these needs and their technology (or lack thereof) inhibits rather than enables the right solutions.
Right now, I just want to focus on the technology piece. It is the key to making the workforce training strategy come to life. Training technology solutions must meet the needs of the workforce when and where they are, ensuring they are always supported with the information, knowledge and skill-building opportunities they need to be successful.
In the current environment, most training is front-end heavy, pushing as much knowledge as possible onto the workforce upon hiring. In reality, most companies need people to interact with training resources at least weekly, if not daily, on an on-going basis. Front-loaded, event-based learning may be an efficient way to deliver a lot of information all at once, but it’s inefficient and ineffective in terms of building a high-performing, competent workforce.
Companies should seek technologies that provide the training environment with these key elements:
- Precision. A direct link between the training and job performance
- Scale. The ability to deliver targeted, just-in-time training to a large, dispersed workforce
- Speed. Rapid implementation and rollout, and quick content updates and conversions
- Ease. Simple for admins and learners to use, navigate and leverage
By focusing on these core essentials, organizations can put themselves in the best position to meet their rapidly evolving skills needs — now and in the future. The key is to employ technology that is intelligent and agile enough to adapt and evolve as the business requires it. Having a workforce training strategy aligned with the business is a great start but without the technology to execute on that strategy, companies cannot move forward.
For a deeper look at how to begin creating an optimized workforce training environment, download this recent eBook here. We will also take a deeper dive into how to get there in a February webinar in partnership with Realizeit.
–David Wentworth, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group
For information on Brandon Hall Group’s research and how we can assist your organization, please visit www.brandonhall.com
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