Why Should Managers Be Investing in Online Training?
We’re all doing things a little differently these days, including remote working, and with this kind of change comes new challenges. Some of us may be missing our work colleagues or still adjusting to Zoom-ing rather than walking to the usual meeting room, while others have found it easy to adapt to working to meet tight deadlines with a cat purring softly nearby or a dog sleeping at their feet.
Whatever the circumstances may be for individual employees, now is the time for managers to invest in online training for their staff. They can feed their minds with knowledge to increase productivity while also upgrading their skills to maintain a sense of wellbeing. But the reasons to invest in online training don’t stop there. The benefits can be enormous for everyone involved.
Easy and long-term access
Many challenges can be hit head-on with online learning simply because of its accessibility, as well as the limited restrictions for completing an e-course. Easy and long-term access are two of the most important reasons for investing in e-Learning when most employees have found themselves working from home, and you can gain more from your staff while they’re spending time in front of their laptops by having them learn and improve skills which are valid to their roles. A varying amount of time in a normal workday can be put aside for training, not only adding variety to the day but also demonstrating how much care you have for your staff and their personal development.
With accessibility also comes the freedom for individuals to learn at their own pace. Deadlines and responsibilities should take precedence, of course, but even putting aside half an hour of each person’s day for training can prove highly valuable. Some may need more time in a day to devote to it, but that’s one of the wonderful things about online training – its flexibility.
Your team will learn more!
The various engagement strategies and assets of online learning can greatly increase knowledge retention. An e-Learning course can provide a rich variety of videos, quizzes, and scenarios, to name just a few potential inclusions, and your employees will be gaining so much more than they would with standard lectures and textbooks. This will make them more engaged and will, in turn, help them apply what they learn directly in their day-to-day tasks.
Visual aids such as illustrations, photographs, and charts can be absorbed more easily than large chunks of content. Offering meaningful graphics is a great learning strategy that has been proved to increase retention, comprehension, and recall in learners. E-learning is there to educate and to make the learning experience more enjoyable, and your staff will absorb much more than they would in a traditional classroom, reading conventional textbooks.
Job and performance improvement
Along with higher retention comes performance improvement. If your team isn’t used to the ins and outs of remote working, the empowerment of greater productivity on the job will boost the confidence of your staff at a time when it’s particularly crucial.
Keeping your employees engaged in their roles will also bring an increase in job satisfaction, a significant aspect of why investing in online training (and even training in general) is so important.
Boosts to morale and mental wellbeing
E-Learning can have an incredibly positive effect on your team, often instilling a well-needed morale boost, to say nothing of the influence it can have on an individual’s mental wellbeing.
It promotes the maintenance of a strong and efficient workforce by creating a more positive environment for your employees, which should be a priority in the current climate. If your staff feel that there’s room for progression in their career by participating in online training, confidence levels will grow and productivity will noticeably increase.
Keeping up with an ever-changing and fast-moving marketplace
Now more than ever before, investing in online training is vital for keeping up with the latest innovations in the world of business and IT. Keeping your team prepared and enabling their certification means that they’ll be ready to thrive in this fast-moving and competitive marketplace. It can boost the agility of your employees and ensure that their skills are sharp and their knowledge up to date. Learning about the benefits of online training first hand will also leave your company well-prepared as the global economy continues to evolve.
Having a competitive advantage
A company has to be sustainable to maintain a competitive advantage, and one of the best ways to ensure sustainability is to provide online training to staff. Your employees may want to advance in their careers, or just be able to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently, and with greater employee contentment comes a more accomplished and cohesive workforce.
Upskilling your staff should be a priority if you want to stay on top and have a competitive edge. Retaining your employees, along with their essential skill sets, will usually depend on keeping them engaged in their jobs. Increasing the level of their skills will help them continue to be proactive and decrease productivity gaps. A dynamic workforce will always have the advantage in a crowd of lesser driven enterprises.
The benefits of an LMS
A Learning Management System (LMS) can bring so many advantages to online corporate training. Course materials and tests can be uploaded and reused infinitely and immediately. Managers can check and evaluate their employees’ completed work, learn about each individual’s progression, and identify where each candidate’s skills can be improved on.
Learners can track their own work and access courses whenever they like, rather than relying on a set offline schedule. Their training can also be done at their own pace, helping them get the most out of their learning experience.
Adapting to new ways of working
Teams are constantly encountering changing dynamics and new work scenarios, and managers are the ones who need to help them adapt. Not only does e-Learning encourage career growth and skill development, but it can also help to improve the techniques with which we work individually and as part of a team, encouraging new means of communicating with each other as well as exchanging and presenting ideas. Managers can choose individual business solutions that fit their particular workforce and even ones that can improve their own managerial skills.
Conclusion
Some of us are already used to working remotely and can function well with the extraordinary measures we have needed to take recently. For others, this may be a whole new world in which to work, and now, more than ever, they need the encouragement and confidence to move ahead.
Whatever circumstances your team members find themselves in, online training can help them to achieve sustainable productivity and growth. There’s no time like now to learn good practices so that you and each individual employee can be at their best and perform at their highest potential.
