Employee training is a continuous process in any organization. It's not only important for new employees but also for existing employees who need to learn emerging skills within their roles and have the option to take any refresher courses to remain efficient in their current job responsibilities.
Organizations that regularly administer employee training have a 21 percent income increase per employee and a 37 percent higher productivity rate. Said differently, your employees can improve their skills and knowledge without decreasing productivity and hindering business continuity. In fact, these statistics show that training has significant benefits for both business and employee bottom-lines, creating a positive feedback loop.
One of the key components of any business' training toolkit are product materials; visuals, guides, manuals and even FAQs. In a nutshell, your employees need to have a clear understanding of what your company sells, how those products and services are best used and what the typical questions (and answers) are related to them.
The most efficient way to manage these materials is through digital creation and delivery.
Employee Onboarding & Orientation
Business-related documents including onboarding and training guides, new hire forms, and other HR-related materials are typically scattered across different departments. Some documentation may be electronic, while other materials are on paper. Let's not forget that a lot of these documents tend to change formatting or information requirements over time, causing a general mess of paperwork for the company to keep track of overall.
Digital content platforms make managing all of this material much more efficient. It allows the business to create a centralized system to store all employee documents. That means employees looking for information about job responsibilities, company policies, and product details can always have a single source of truth.
Additionally, digital tools usually offer a more engaging employee training experience with the potential of guided tasks, tips, and instructions across all device types.
Continuous Learning, Self-Learning, & Microlearning
Digitized product materials are available to all employees all the time. There's no need to schedule a meeting with someone on the product team to get answers. This means all employees, both old and new, can refer to this documentation whenever they have questions on anything product-related.
Digital transformation of content has enhanced the learning experience because it supports microlearning or the ability to learn in small bits using mobile devices. For example, if a member of marketing or sales needs to know the newest feature set rolling out in this month's product release, a training module specific to that release can be tagged as such which makes it simple and easy for those team members to search for, find and use that information to best communicate those features to prospective and existing customers.
Instructor-Led Training
Digital content also makes instructor-led training more readily available to any number of trainees anywhere and at any time. Digital training applies various digital collaboration and communication tools that make it easier for instructors to deliver this information across the company, especially if they have a distributed workforce.
For example, employees can now get trained through simulations, meaning they'll get the opportunity to observe how a product operates or how it works in real life but in a simulated environment. This is just as effective as hands-on training but is less costly and bears no risk, especially in cases where employees are trained using potentially dangerous machines or chemicals.
Mentoring
A digitized training program is efficient for both the mentee and mentor. It saves the mentor's time without decreasing the efficiency of the program. Using the rich analytics and reporting features of digital tools, a mentor can learn almost everything about the mentee in a very short time. This will help the mentor come up with an adaptive training program.
Additionally, supplementary digital communication tools also enable mentees to contact their mentors any time they need their advice or help.
It's time to Transform Your Product Materials
Today, it's near impossible to imagine a training and development program that doesn't leverage technology in some way. Digital transformation enables faster content curation and delivery, continuously cultivating employees' knowledge and skills on topics as important as your businesses' product offerings.
Contact a member of GT today for help digitizing your content today.
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