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The future of training

Criticality of training in current organizations

Like any successful organization, your strategy must include recruiting and retaining the best quality employees possible. In an expanding economy with a tight labor market, top-performing companies recognize the challenge of retaining staff. With multiple generations present in today’s workplaces, providing personalized and targeted training is key.

A convergence of multiple environmental, socioeconomic and technological influences presents you with the challenge of retaining staff. You need to increase your training and development efforts. Training plays a critical role in your employee’s ability to actively contribute to the company’s operational, strategic, and financial goals.

Through training, an employee learns the vision and strategies of the company. He also learns how you can add skills, knowledge, and abilities to your resume to take on different and growing roles within your organization. The employee understands that she is an integral part of the whole. He sees how critical his involvement is in achieving business goals and objectives.

An employee needs consistent and repetitive messages over time about their company’s core values ​​and individual and team performance expectations. Composite performance synergies are then developed to improve your organization’s overall productivity and achievement. The employee buys the vision. He begins to actively participate in his own development. His loyalty to the company increases. In this high-performance organizational model, his challenge is to build a training organization within the human resources function that encourages, informs, and helps retain his employees.

How is training changing?

The evolution of technology and the daily use of computers in the workplace have already impacted the way employees receive training. Many e-learning providers are responding to workplace needs or legal mandates to provide specific training for employees. In 2006, in the state of California, AB 1825 went into effect, which requires supervisors to receive sexual harassment prevention training at least once every two years. Many law firms and e-learning providers have jumped on the bandwagon to develop “interactive” e-learning programs that can satisfy a portion of the new mandatory training requirements. Employees can use self-paced, technology-based training to learn course content, ask questions of “online editors,” and take a quiz at the end of the section to show what they’ve learned. Programs like this one can also track participants and generate printed reports to demonstrate company compliance with mandatory training.

The Department of Homeland Security uses new modeling and simulation software to cost-effectively conduct homeland security training. Students use reality-based simulations to learn critical information. New recruits learn of their successes and failures before experiencing them firsthand in actual combat. The Wired magazine article, “The War Room,” describes how f/x artists, scientific researchers, Pentagon experts, and game developers came together to create the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), a research and development group from the University of Southern California. ICT virtual training uses an ancient forum to teach soldiers how to better navigate difficult combat situations that involve layers of decisions to react: storytelling.

The new training paradigm

Professors from Indiana and Warwick Universities (Kim et al.) titled “Survey of the Future of the Workplace: E-Learning: The Rise of Blending, Interactivity, and Authentic Learning.” The companies answered 49 questions related to e-learning. Their responses were overwhelmingly optimistic, indicating that they support and embrace e-learning or blended learning. Blended learning is a marriage of traditional, face-to-face lectures, and online training. Current conventional wisdom on workplace training says that blended learning presents alternative venues for companies to train employees. Reinforce key messages and reach people with different learning styles through a variety of learning opportunities.

Companies were asked what technology-based applications and instructional methods would be used in the future. They stated that “…authentic cases and scenario learning, simulations or games, virtual team collaboration and problem solving, and problem-based learning will be more widely used in the next decade.” (Kim et al.) Distributed learning environments can be represented by virtual communities, blogs, instant messaging, and group collaboration and computer-assisted problem solving (Bonk & Graham). Predictions of “environments that simultaneously facilitate both distributed environments and face-to-face interactions are on the horizon and require eLearning facilitators to assume broader and more varied roles.”

E-learning facilitators “wear four pairs of shoes,” according to e-learning experts Ed Hootstein and Zane Berge. They assume the roles of instructor, social director, program manager, and technical assistant. E-learning facilitators can create authentic and situational learning examples in addition to traditional instruction through a variety of e-technology applications. These include email, collaborative software, audio and video conferencing. “The wide range of electronic tolls available for analysis, design, planning, problem solving, and presentations enable students to perform sophisticated and complex tasks and creative problem solving.” (Hootstein)

According to Berge, the ultimate goal of technology-based training development is “to make technology transparent.” Due to advances over time in the availability and economics of technology in today’s workplace, the e-learning facilitator can focus on the content and delivery of materials to teach key learning.

Authentic or experiential learning has also become fashionable. We draw on our knowledge and life experiences to learn and understand, and personal behavior may change as a result. This learning is based on “awareness, experience and reflection”. (Grimmett) It’s about making a connection, bringing home the example in question to resonate with the participant in a meaningful way to change a person’s perception and belief system.

Next steps and summary

Large corporations such as Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft already use authentic blended learning in their training systems (Bonk & Graham). This emergence of blended learning provides the next generation of training application and delivery systems. It teaches employees key lessons in a variety of ways. It provides a greater opportunity to learn through technology, face-to-face situations, and authentic learning experiences.

E-learning will need to be evaluated to determine “…online student achievement and satisfaction, followed by clearer reward systems and incentives for e-learning completion and training that helps students self-regulate their learning.” (Kim et al.). These thoughts reflect the next steps companies need to take to encourage employee participation in blended learning programs. Still, learning blended with authentic scenarios now represents an opportunity for companies to build their own L&D function and take advantage of the wealth of resources that are available through this new and evolving training paradigm.

© 2007 – Regan HR, Inc.

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