Corporate training is crucial for companies that look to improve their business and their standing in the market. Well-trained workers provide a higher quality of services and do so more efficiently. Also, employees who have acquired the knowledge and skills needed to do their job feel more confident and accomplished than those who have little or no formal training.

Understanding how people learn has been the ultimate goal of education since the beginning. Nowadays, we have fascinating new technologies and techniques for delivering, reinforcing, and assessing learning. As educators, one of our focuses is to help businesses improve their employee training programs and recognize the challenges they may face along the way.

1. Improving Learning Effectiveness

Learning effectiveness is defined by what elements of instruction trainees have retained and can replicate when they get back to their position. Performance improvement is the main goal of corporate training, and the main challenge is getting trainees to understand and employ everything that they are being presented with. The worst-case scenario would be for the employees to take time from their tasks but retain nothing in the process.

Companies should make sure that they organize training into units that are well-structured and easy to understand. Filler content, that which does not teach a valuable skill, must be excluded from training courses. Instruction should be focused and neatly tailored to provide the most essential information and make it easy to absorb. Saturating training with unimportant information is a waste of time and makes it difficult to focus on what is truly important. Instructors should make sure that they know exactly why they included something and what they wish to accomplish with it. Any part that does not serve a clearly defined purpose should be removed.

Even after removing filler, corporate training programs contain a lot of information packed into a relatively short period. Employees should feel engaged and interacted with. At the end of the training, they should be evaluated in a way that tests them individually.

Source: https://info.shiftelearning.com/blog/statistics-on-corporate-training-and-what-they-mean-for-your-companys-future

2. Employee Certification

The rapid development of professional testing and certification programs in recent years reflects the increasing need for expertise in modern society.

Certification of professional staff allows the employer to navigate through the global workforce. For employees, individual certification provides credentials that support employment in an increasingly crowded job market. For customers, certifications provide assurance that the professionals they hire have been approved by an organization involved in providing instruction and knowledge that lies at the core of each profession.

However, studies have shown that a considerable portion of organizations that provide professional certification use informal, improvised mechanisms and processes in the exam development process. The importance of professional certifications and the exams that support them means that the methods by which tests are created and administered need to be well structured, uniform, and rigorous.

Source: Needs and Challenges in the Development of Professional Licensure and Certification Exams

3. Implementing Mobile Learning

According to an article on 4 Challenges Of Mobile Learning In Corporate Training in the eLearning Industry, Millennials will have formed 50% of the global workforce by 2020. Having grown up with information technologies, Millennials seem to be especially fond of using mobile devices in every aspect of everyday life, such as education and work. Four out of five workers reported accessing their corporate documents on the move using their mobile devices.

Considering the fact that the number of employees who use their mobile devices in the workplace grows, instructors are given the opportunity to provide them with mobile learning options. Mobile learning makes corporate training accessible to everyone, regardless of time or location. It allows employees to learn on the go, even without an internet connection.

Mobile learning has numerous benefits, but it also has its challenges. The risk of compromising data security appears to be the most troubling and is the obstacle that prevents most companies from implementing mobile learning. Businesses need to address this problem with adequate security measures which can solve the issues associated with mobile traffic.

4. Inadequate Training Materials

Materials created for traditional classrooms rarely translate well to corporate training. Maintaining multiple training approaches might require multiple versions of your content, and creating and adapting materials can delay or disrupt the instruction program. Also, developing content and holding courses and workshops that are specifically suited for different goals and proficiency levels require a considerable financial investment which is the next challenge on the list.

The world changes faster than ever before, and the business world is changing along with it. Even companies that widely use eLearning methods find it difficult to keep pace, often relying on outdated training programs. At best, using older training material will be less effective in the learning process. At worst, it can provide inaccurate information. Instructors need to find ways to quickly update content to reflect the newest trends and ever-changing needs of employers. This problem becomes easier to solve as training gets more and more digitalized. Content can be supplemented and updated quickly, and this is made much easier the more organized the training becomes.

The need for adequate, standardized content is even more emphasized in the era of offshoring and recruiting from the global workforce. VLE and LMS are the best tools to provide employees with needed instruction all around the world. This implies that the content be well structured and that concepts are made clear regardless of language and cultural differences.

5. Budget Constraints

As mentioned above, to implement a successful employee training strategy, businesses need to invest in the creation of learning material suitable for the purpose. The costs of traditional seminars and workshops might be too high if one targets a geographically dispersed audience. A company might not have the appropriate funds to acquire needed resources and update old training programs.

Despite the initial cost, eLearning can improve employee retention and engagement, resulting in substantial returns on the company’s investment. Nevertheless, justifying the expense of a new learning program can prove difficult. Effectively integrating the new tactics and technology associated with eLearning can challenge the company’s financial capabilities. Furthermore, many of the organizations that deal in corporate training have no formal system for measuring results in the first place. However, in the future, experience, widespread adoption, and time will lead to the development of the analytical tools needed to track the profitability of eLearning programs.

Final Thoughts

Mobile and eLearning promise to increase the effectiveness of corporate training programs and address many of its challenges. However, you need to stay aware of the security risks and financial costs that come with it and prepare to invest substantial effort to produce appropriate content for training and measure the results of your new training system.

If you want to give your employees training options that fit their lifestyle and give your company a competitive edge, implementing these strategies should have a positive impact on your overall business.

Finding the right software that can meet these needs can be quite challenging. To help you out and reduce the searching process, I recommend checking out YouTestMe GetCertified software for knowledge evaluation and certification.