Businesses are constantly changing, and the pandemic brought on the biggest change with an immediate shift to remote work for a majority of employees. Not only were employees working from home, but business processes needed to be updated to reflect the rapid shift. Many employers were caught off guard without a virtual new employee orientation program and initial company training. New employees were sitting at home attending meeting, but not able to fully engage in their position. The question is why.
For years companies have often been slow to kickstart their learning programs and many companies that do offer learning, the courses may not adequately meet the needs of the employees or the company. Companies were focused on in-person learning, for example, take a 3-week course and then go perform your job. All the training was done onsite. Facilitators may have traveled quite a bit to meet the needs of the learners. If you look at this model, it was nice but would eventually be a failure as you would need several facilitators or outside vendors to meet the need of in person training. I personally love in-person training as the facilitator and the team get to develop a rapport with each other. However, things are changing and there are two models’ companies are starting to adopt.
Model 1: Barebones
The barebones model focuses on 2-3 individuals. A manager and two facilitators. The manager does most of the reporting and compliance while the facilitators run the new employee orientation and specialty training on the ground. eLearning’s and digital learnings are outsourced to a 3rd party vendor (like Performance Interactions). The 3rd part vendor worked with the in-house learning team to develop the needs analysis, collect information, documentation, and then build courses for the companies learning library. This free’s up time for the in-house learning team. The company does not have to hire multiple people to create a large learning team. The company gets to create courses ad-hoc. The company saves money by not having to invest in educational technology. The company has the option to outsource their LMS function or run the LMS in-house. This barebones model allows companies to save money but be adaptable and flexible. This is perfect for companies with 200-5,000 employees.
Model 2: Elaborate
The elaborate model focuses on companies with over 5,000 employees that may need several different learnings fast. In this model, the company hires an entire learning team: directors, managers, instructional designers, eLearning developers, facilitators, etc. If done correctly, the number of learning employees make this model successful for larger organizations. However, companies have a large employee overhead, software, technology, etc. For larger organizations that have not started a learning library, it might be beneficial to consult with a 3rd party vendor on content creation to get the companies learning up to speed.
In conclusion no matter which model your organization chooses, you employees will be the ones who benefit the most from just-in-time learning. The result of this investment is better customer service or customer training.