Agile Businesses Need Agile Training

The agility with which a business adapts to the ever-changing landscape of consumer preferences and technology is, to a large extent, dependent on how well it facilitates training and skill development. In fact, a 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center revealed that 87% workers believe that training and developing new skills is essential throughout one’s work life, so that they can keep up with the changes at the workplace.

In fact, such ongoing, self-driven learning has gained huge popularity in recent years, over the traditional forms of corporate training that require employees to set time aside from their life and work to attend classes. Against such a backdrop, the need of the hour is to provide workers accessible means of skill acquisition through “plug and play” platforms that allow them to consume bite-sized chunks of information at their own pace. And, when such platforms are powered by AI, they can become recommendation engines that help workers navigate their learning path and, therefore, their careers, in a proactive way.

Why Traditional Training No Longer Works

The traditional training paradigm is classroom-based, where monotonous lectures, crammed full of information don’t really foster retention. Such lectures need to be attended in person, which means taking time out of one’s already hectic schedule. This is especially difficult for those who work unconventional or graveyard shifts.

Moreover, such training is often broad-based and caters to the entire group. This implies that workers who are ahead of or lag behind the average group member will be at a disadvantage. Traditional training has also been criticized for providing limited resources for those who wish to take a deeper dive into specific topics. Such people often have to depend on their own ability to find relevant material for incremental information.

In addition, in the corporate environment, traditional training modules often do not entail any assessment or monitoring of the training, which means that we really don’t know whether all the effort put into training by all concerned has borne the desired fruit.

Another issue with traditional modules is that they are time-intensive even in their creation. It can take weeks, if not months, to develop the training program, create content for it and then roll out the program. Then there is the need for the trainees to stop what they are doing at the appointed hour and physically move to the classroom situation. In fact, some programs might even require trainees to travel to a different location to attend the training program. Can you imagine the loss of productivity this leads to?

With businesses becoming agile and the pace of change occurring almost at the speed of light, especially when it comes to tech and fintech companies, the traditional training model proves both inadequate and ineffective. 

Another area where traditional training falls short is addressing the training needs of millennials. This “digital native” not only likes to consume content on the go, but they also have short attention spans and a need for instant gratification. In fact, the State of Workplace Training Study, conducted by Axonify in 2016, revealed some key needs of millennials, especially associated with training:

• 91% respondents said that they wanted training to be personalized and relevant
• 90% wanted it to be fun and engaging
• 89% wanted to be able to access training from anywhere and at any time
• 85% wanted to be able to choose their training time, based on their individual schedules
• 80% believed that regular or frequent training was very important

Training at the Speed of Business

The need of the hour is training that is able to keep pace with the rapidly changing business needs, while also adapting to the changing needs of today’s learner. This is where digital learning platforms can be of huge help. A key advantage of a digital platform is that training modules can be created and disseminated very quickly. With a basic skeleton already in place, all an organization needs to do is customize various elements to meet its specific training goals and needs. In addition, updating and modifying content becomes easy and fast.

In addition, a digital approach can help an organization effectively create immersive content, without having to go through prolonged content creation cycles, as in traditional methods. A learning platform will easily absorb all types of content and integrate them for easy access. In addition, it will allow for completely self-paced learning, while putting efficient means of tracking, assessing and analyzing in place. In addition, it will provide the ability to create micro-learning nuggets that can be consumed on the fly.

Now, take this a step further and integrate a smart AI-driven chatbot and you can add alternative means of training, such as a question-and-answer mode, with the chatbot helping the learner discover relevant content while breaking down bulky information into digestible chunks. Imagine an AI powered platform that is also able to track each learner’s likes, dislikes, preferences and reading habits, recommending just the right content to plug skill gaps and improve their knowledge base. This would make curating content, based on job roles, a lot easier.

Furthermore, digital training also proves to be an asset for organizations with remote teams, given that content can be distributed to any employee, anywhere in the world.

A Learning Experience Platform to the Rescue

What the corporate world needs, however, is a move away from the bulky, cumbersome learning management systems (LMS) to a smart learning experience platform (LXP). This is what KEA, an AI-based LXP, offers. It helps organizations create intuitive, personalized, engaging and relevant training modules. It is the AI-driven interface that fosters deep learning, by analyzing each learner’s learning behavior and preferences, and then recommending relevant content.

With the use of an LXP, a company can then offer personalized training modules, based on the skill set, learning pace, requirements, and goals of each individual employee. Also, given the ease of creating, publishing and distributing content in multiple forms, including audio and video formats, training modules can become multisensory and, therefore, much more engaging.

Some of the other advantages that an LXP like KEA offer include:

• Enhancing the learning experience via seamless integration with a company’s existing LMS
• Easing access due to compatibility across a wide range of devices and operating systems, including iOS, Android and Windows
• Allowing the conversion of documents into “trackable” content, so that training progress can be monitored, both by the learner and the organization
• Making content easily discoverable with the use of NLP to auto-generate meta-tags for the content of various formats

In the end, it is the willingness of the organization to embrace shifts in employee needs as well as technological advancement that will help it remain relevant, while fostering and etaining talent. On the other hand, ongoing learning is the best way for employees to consistently grow their skill sets and advance their careers.

Schedule a demo with us, if you wish to know more about KEA.