CENTRALIZING LEARNING

September 18, 2013

Until the last couple of decades, corporations with multiple locations had to cope with difficult training challenges. Their individual plants had near-autonomy in training plans and purchases and, because of inconsistencies in training curricula, it was difficult to reassign personnel from one location to another. Without uniform curricula and centralized purchasing many organizations were continually challenged by a lack of standardization, inconsistency, and facilitation. An absence of centralized record-keeping also negatively impacted their efforts.

Modern LMS’s have successfully addressed the latter issue and, today, networked video-based learning is effectively solving the other challenges.

One such multi-national company has commented publicly about the positive impacts made by their corporate-installed LMS and, most importantly, by their adoption of network-delivered, video-based learning.

“At first, we had no full-blown training program which anyone and everyone could utilize. However, with networked video-based training we have found an answer that is not only cost-effective for use at multiple plant locations, but also has received favorable responses from the employees. Everyone’s happy today: upper management, the supervisors, the trainers, and our workforce.”

Well-designed media training is the greatest value in learning today. The investment is comparatively modest and the retention results are excellent.

With traditional classroom training, the more you use it, the more it costs. With self-paced learning, employees really do spend more time on the job and less time training. That’s because networked learning allows each worker to proceed at their own pace — rather than being slowed down within a classroom setting. The interactivity allows the worker to repeat, review, and retain much more of the information than was ever possible in a traditional “lecture/reading” environment.

And, that self-paced learning must be video-based in order to give you the results you desire — because nearly half of your trainees cannot assimilate information written above a 4th grade reading level.

Avoid programs with lots of challenging words and, instead, use the near-simulation tools which have been the core of formalized video-based learning for the past three decades. The delivery method may have changed (today it’s mostly networked) but the learning principles have not.

As one company representative has said, “If we want to help our employees work smarter, we’ve got to give them the tools to do the best job possible. We can do that with video-based learning.”