Transcript
I get asked every once in a while what type of method should we use to train our thousand employees. Should we use webinars, should we use online training, should we use live training, should we just send them emails? My response is you should use all of them and use it in a blended format. So, what I’ll talk about is the five different ways of getting things out.
Obviously, everybody uses email all the time. Well, we’ll just email them the message. Not a bad thing to do, but as many emails as everybody gets, the likelihood of them actually opening it, reading it, and obtaining that knowledge is low. But sending out emails for mass communication is not a bad thing to do; it’s inexpensive and easy to do.
The next method is live in-person training. Let’s fly around the country and train all these people in person. It’s probably the most effective way of transferring the knowledge; however, it’s probably the most expensive and it doesn’t scale. The good thing about live training is it is very effective for small groups, but if you have a thousand folks out there, it’s a little bit challenging to do.
Another method is webinars. Webinars have become so mainstream, and you can do a webinar and talk to everybody and so on. The downside of webinars is most people think about the last time they participated in a webinar, they most likely multitasked three or four times. So the downside with a webinar is you don’t really have the people engaged unless you use some advanced tools like polling and questions, having cameras, and community engagement. Webinars are relatively easy to deploy, it’s effective, however, you can’t measure the effectiveness since it’s not tied usually to an LMS and also, you can’t really see the engagement.
Online training with a self-paced online course is good because it’s highly scalable. You can get to a thousand people with an online training class, you can control the content of it, it’s trackable, and you really can see if people are getting the knowledge or not. They can also do it on their own time periods. You actually could train a thousand, 5,000, 10,000 people globally on a single topic within a couple of days. The downside of online training is sometimes the length it takes to develop the training from the time that goes from the storyboard to the ADDIE review, to the instructional design review, and if it has to go through compliance, sometimes developing an online course can take a while.
The last method is printed material. Many folks still send out printed material. The downside is most people and organizations today don’t have a physical mailbox anymore, so actually getting it to them can be a little bit hard, it can get lost in the shuffle. But the good thing about printed material is it’s consistent, it’s economical, it’s highly controlled, and it’s really good as a job aid or something to augment other methods.
So in general, when I’m asked what tool should I use to train all our employees or all our customers, I usually say I would look to use them all but understand the strengths and weaknesses of each one of the tools and use them in a blended format. Regardless of the delivery mechanism, having some system to measure whether the person got it, whether it be an assessment, a survey, and it should be tied back to the learning management system.
