US companies spend over $70 billion in corporate training. It represents over $130 billion worldwide according to The Corporate Learning Factbook. A McKinsey study shows that only a quarter of these training sessions allow employees to improve their performance.
So, how to turn these training costs into effectiveness for employees and users of business applications?
Business Application: training is vital
80% of jobs require to have digital competencies. Many companies think that employees feel comfortable with business application such as Word or Excel. They also think that a business application like a CRM or a HRMS is intuitive for them. Unfortunately, it is not always so easy…
Bad apdoption of business app directly impacts your employees’ efficiency!
Why does traditional training for business application fail?
Many companies still allocate 80% of their budget to “traditional training”: class-sessions during which a trainer comments a PowerPoint presentation and employees take notes. This approach is expensive and inefficient for the company…
1. No practice
When a trainee or learner only takes note on “How to raise or enter an order” in the new ERP system, it is unlikely he will remember how to do it once alone in front of his screen.! A trainee will forget 40% of the content he learned in traditional class-sessions within the next 20 minutes. After 9 hours, he will remembers 36% of the content and after a month, only 10% will be left! Without immediate and regular practice the training session is useless! At a high cost for the company!
2. The trainer
Most of the time, companies entrust the training of business application to the CIO. However, even if the CIO knows indeep how the business applications work, he is not necessarily the best. Trainers should talk about use cases, business situations and practices before talking about the application itself!
3. Existing knowledge
In a group of people, you will find discrepancies in terms of knowledge and competencies. Some will only know the basic while others will be real experts! Doing a traditional training with such uneven a group is a waste of time!
4. Learning approach
Each of us like to train in a different ways and at different speed. Group training sessions do not take this observation into account!
5. Relevance
If an employee does not understand the reason why he is training, for him, for his job, he will not put any effort into it.
What about digital training?
Some companies innovate and decided to choose digital means to train their collaborators. However, they still fail.
1. E-learning videos
Even if videos are efficient to explain a new feature of a business application for example, it does not allow the employee to practice.
Videos are good tools to explain short thing but useless to learn how to use a new business application.
2. Online quiz
Quizz are more engaging than videos but do not prepare the employee to the use of a business application! Even if the user has the right answer to the question, it doesn’t mean that he knows how to make it in the system.
A good alternative = Just-in-time learning!
As you understand, practice is the most efficient way to train employees! Especially when it comes to train them on business applications. People need to practice, to master all the processes and procedures that must be applied. Actually, there are many things to understand.That’s the reason why just-in-time learning is the best solution. By the way, 70% of learning is made hands-on.
How does it work? The user is in front of his screen and has to work with its business application (create an order in the ERP, enter an opportunity in the CRM etc..). But, it is difficult for him to remember what he learned during the powerpoint presentation!
Thanks to a just-in-time learning solution (like Shortways), your employee has access to training content in 1 click, directly from the business application. It can be any kind of training content (video, text, powerpoint, micro-learning..). This training content will be accessible for the user, right when he needs it.
Easy to use and super-efficient!
Source : https://elearningindustry.com/business-application-training-important