Automated trainings together with a learning management system (LMS) frees up your experts to do their job instead of coaching the new employees. It automates your training process saving time and making trainings more efficient.
What is automation?
We all know what automation means when it comes to production and development.
A repetitive and non-creative task performed manually or by a human, is automated and by this is performed faster and without human errors by a machine, a robot, or by a program. By this humans are released from performing repetitive and boring tasks and allowed to do more creative and innovative jobs, which robots cannot perform.
Why training automation?
According to the 2022 Workplace Learning and Development Report, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that more than 11 million jobs are unfilled in U.S. Which means that companies need to fill those gaps with the workforce who have the hard skills required to perform the jobs. And with the soft skills required to: communicate well, and empathize with co-workers, teams, leaders etc.
Organizational leaders facing skills gaps are hoping to upskill and reskill their own employees by providing workplace learning and development.
“Closing the skills gap is a major driver of L&D today. Of the 53% of HR managers who say they face a skills gap within their company, just over half (51%) say training employees is their primary method of addressing the problem. It is by far the most common solution when compared with hiring new employees (32%) or leveraging independent contractors and freelancers (17%).” (Source of text and picture: 2022 Workplace Learning and Development Report)
Do automated trainings save the situation?
Can we automate the process of training new employees and release the experts and “the colleagues”, that were playing the role of the trainer/coach, and let them do their job?
In many companies, the colleague sitting next to the new employee is designated to show him the work procedures and work process of that company. End effect: the companies have less operative work done because their operative employees do the job of teaching instead of doing their job.
In this type of training, the subjective part plays a significant role and the teaching is not uniform and subjective. Each employee will show how HE does the work, how HE uses the tool, and how HE has understood the topic. After some generations of employees being trained like that, you can expect that the transferred information is deformed, not complete. Something a bit exaggerated but an appropriate comparison is “The broken telephone” game.
Can programs and platforms take over such an interactive activity as teaching/coaching?
And if yes, up to which level?
What is training automation?
A digital academy!
In any area, there are two generic steps to make any process efficient:
1. Create systems.
2. Automate those systems.
Take as an example the production lines. First, they defined the process of production: clearly defined operations and their order of implementation. And then replaced humans with robots to perform these operations, each time in the same manner, without errors and without changing or skipping steps.
The process of training employees can be made efficient by following the same procedure.
Step 1: Digital Training Strategy (create a system)
The first step in digitalizing trainings is to create a training system. This is called the digital training strategy.
It is imperative to define for each department and then broken down for each team:
- what are the knowledge packages that employees need in order to perform their work
- based on how the information from these packages relates to each other, what is the best sequenced to be delivered
- how is passive learning blended with active learning
- what are the levels of competence and which knowledge contributes to each of these levels
- what are the skills to be achieved
- when shall they be tested and what is a fair indicator of that skill? Test results suffice or another input is needed, like the feedback of his direct leader or the number of sales he has closed, etc?
- if as a consequence of the evaluation, the targeted level is not achieved, shall the employee repeat the training
Only when all these are clearly defined for each team or type of job, you have a training system. This training system will be automated by using the so-called learning management system(LMS).
Why would I need a learning management system?
The LMS has two main roles:
- to hold, organize and make the trainings available to employees and
- to track the learning progress and the cognitive status of each employee.
For the best usage of such learning management systems, you first need to create a digital training strategy.
Because the LMS:
- allows you to store all the knowledge and trainings that exists in your company. Those are then available for all your employees at all locations
- allows you to create an account for each employee
- and to define a learning path/learning journey for each employee. The learning journey could mean a sequence of some trainings, but also a sequence with only some chapters from different trainings. Here is where the training strategy comes into play and dictates what has to be included in the learning journey for each type of job.
- and last but not least it monitors and tracks the learning progress. Meaning how many training units/training hours the employee has gone through. But also what is his cognitive level measured by tests for each training.
Step 2: Create Digital Trainings ( automate the system)
Now that we have the LMS in place, it has to be filled with content. The content is made up of digital trainings or digital pieces of trainings. It depends on the level of modularity that was foreseen for the trainings.
What are digital trainings, or digital content?
- eLearning snippets with or without voice over
- a video recording of the trainer/expert presenting the topic
- an animated avatar of the trainer/presenter
- animation or explanation videos
- scenario-based learning experiences
- a mixture of the above options
In digitalizing training content, the important factor is not how much animation or how cool the animation is. When developing digital trainings, the focus shall be on learning with understanding, attention, and engagement.
2.1.Learning with understanding
When an expert plays the role of the teacher, he misses pedagogical knowledge. So, in most cases, his trainings does not facilitate understanding, mainly for beginners.
“The knowledge necessary for expertise in a discipline has to be differentiated from the pedagogical knowledge that implies effective teaching” ( Lee S. Shulman, 1986, 1987)
A second problem with having an expert in the role of the trainer is the curse of knowledge. This is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with other individuals, assumes that the other individuals have the background knowledge to understand.
The curse of knowledge in teaching is the tendency to underestimate how long it will take another person to learn something new or perform a task that the teacher/trainer already masters.
“Teachers often suffer this illusion – the calculus instructor who finds calculus so easy that she can no longer place herself in the shoes of the student who is just starting out and struggling with the subject” (Brown, Roediger III, McDaniel – make it stick: The Science of Successful Learning)
2.2.Attention and engagement
Attention sustains engagement and engagement implies attention. It is like a loop and if you manage to create one, the other one follows.
There are many ways to stimulate attention, just to enumerate some of them:
I.Start with clear goals, cognitive goals, and expectations
II.Digital trainings can be designed and developed interactively. It can show questions that the trainee must answer engaging him in the content because he is curious to find out the answer
III.Use multimedia, and incorporate visual aids, such as images, videos, or interactive exercises, to make the training more interesting. It helps memory consolidation and maintains participants’ attention.
IV.Use humor and storytelling, where allowed and suited
V.Vary the pace and format: blended learning. Mix up the training by alternating between digital courses, group work, or workshops and individual exercises.
Teaching and training can’t follow a specific recipe. Lee S. Shulman(1986, 1987) states that “teaching strategies differ across disciplines”. For this reason, before digitalizing trainings it is worth having an expert in pedagogy and learning to transform the presentation of the trainer into a training, because a presentation is not a training.
Why automated trainings?
1. Automated trainings offers benefits to company
1.1. Eliminates repetitive and formulaic steps in the trainings process
Everything that is either repetitive or formulaic can be automated because is supported by most of the LMS’ that are on the market.
Tedious tasks like trainee enrollments, maintaining trainings records, tracking and monitoring user progress, and adding and removing employees are repetitive tasks. And predictable communications such as informing employees of training dates, required learning material, total duration of a training course, and organization of rooms and learning materials are highly formulaic. You can get rid of both by using automated trainings.
1.2. Streamlining the onboarding process
Any business that needs to grow will need a higher number of employees. Possibly also distributed workforce over more countries/continents. Just, imagine manually repeating the same process, the same trainings, just in different locations. The thought alone might suck the joy out of business growth.
With automated trainings you only establish this process once, and simply initiate it with every batch of new onboards.
1.3. Saves time and money
Businesses can save time and money by applying automated trainings. The only condition is to be strategic.
Designing and developing trainings has a fixed cost, which applies mainly once. The most expensive aspect of company training, by far, is execution and delivery. In other words, you can save money when your automation efforts are focused on training delivery.
With a correct training strategy, oriented on position and job tasks, you can have your employees working and learning at the same time, already from day 1.
1.4. Provide a consistent, reliable, and standardized learning experience
Many organizational developments are often beholden to government legislation and compliance requirements. As a consequence, they have developed an internal work process that each employee must follow when conducting his tasks.
Particularly in this case, it is important to provide a consistent and reliable learning process in regard to the standards or requirements to be fulfilled, or to the process that has to be followed. In these cases you do not want the subjective teaching: “This is how I do this. Here is where I do that. This is how I use the tool. etc“
2. Automated trainings offer benefits to employees
2.1. Convenience and flexibility
Automated trainings allow employees to learn at their own pace, on their own time, and from any location with an internet connection. This can make training more convenient and flexible for employees who may have busy schedules or who work remotely.
This type of training allows the employees to learn while they are solving their tasks, meaning the knowledge related to solving an assigned can be acquired step by step while solving the task.
2.2. Improved retention
When we talk only about the first step of learning, which is information acquisition, the pyramid of learning shows that out of all passive learning methods, the audio-visual presentation offers the highest retention rate.
As you can see in the graphic below, from the point of retention, face-to-face training (lecturing) has the lowest retention of all: 5%. In terms of retention, if you want your employees to retain more, 10%, give them the material to read, instead of having it presented.
Automated trainings can be more engaging and interactive than traditional classroom training, with the condition to use multimedia, simulations, animations, and interactive quizzes. This can help employees retain information better, up to 20% and apply it more effectively on the job.
2.3.Upskilling and reskilling
Digital training can provide employees with the skills and knowledge they need to advance their careers or transition to new roles within the organization. This can improve employee satisfaction because it satisfies the highest human need according to Maslow’s pyramid of needs: self-actualization, and reduce turnover.
It is also an advantage also for the company to be able to upskill and reskill and keep its valuable employees in case of restructuring.
If this is your first foray into the world of eLearning and digital trainings, then Automated Training is a solid bet. It enables you to record professional training videos effortlessly, and output slide-based courses with media, innovative interactions, quizzes, and role-plays. It offers complete services in employee training digitalization and the creation of a dedicated digital academy: digital training strategy, content digitalization, and support for Learning Management System (LMS). The content is completely owned by the business, meaning no license fees to pay for it.
