7 Strategies to Successfully Deploy Online Training

Youth is wasted on the young, said Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. The same can be said about education. While young, we couldn’t care less about it. The moment we grow up though, we start regretting our past choices, wishing we were a bit more versed in the matters of life, science, art, and our own professions.

Online training may not be able to compensate for what we’ve lost in our youth, but it can definitely make us better at our jobs. It can help us adjust to our workplace environments, dust off our theoretical knowledge, and hone new applicable skills. This is how important online training is for employees.

 

Here’s how you can make it even more effective in terms of knowledge retention.

 

1. Personalize Learning Paths Using AI Insights

Is your organization using e-Learning software for online training deployment? If not, you should employ one of these tools right now, and we’ll tell you why.

e-Learning technology is cutting-edge right now, which means that most of these solutions rely on artificial intelligence to provide personalized learning environments. This is incredibly important in the context of online training, as learning habits in adults are much less flexible than in younger students. Adults need a very targeted approach.

Your employees are struggling with their time, focus, and motivation on a daily basis. Add training to their schedules, and their employee satisfaction rates will eventually drop.

Personalized learning, on the other hand, makes this experience easier and more enjoyable by adjusting educational content to people’s specific needs, habits, and preferences. It allows them to take online training courses at their own terms and to study at their own pace, which is crucial when it comes to juggling private and professional lives.

What does AI have to do with this? Well, using machine learning, it collects data from your trainees, analyzes their learning needs, and helps you create online training courses that are deeply personalized.

 

2. Make Content Consumable with MicroLearning

Trying to develop a work-life balance teaches us that time is incredibly valuable. A deficit of time, focus, and motivation presents a big obstacle to adult learners, who require a different approach to educational content.

Another thing that e-Learning software allows you to do is to organize online training courses in chunks of information that are bite-sized and easier to consume on a tight schedule. This strategy is called microlearning.

With microlearning, your employees can take courses whenever they have a productive minute to spare – while commuting to work and during their lunch breaks, for instance. The goal is to reduce your employees’ effort and make training more convenient. To achieve this, microlearning uses consumable content formats such as video and infographics.

 

3. Increase Learner Engagement with Gamification

But is there any way to increase their engagement, too? Can you introduce an element of fun to your online training courses, in addition to making them personalized and convenient? Sure you can. The only thing you need is imagination.

Presuming you already have a gamified e-Learning software, of course. Gamification taps into our childish love for games to provide edutaining experiences, or experiences that are entertaining and educational at the same time.

Examples of this strategy include competitions, point scoring, and other elements of game playing that can be incorporated in non-game contexts such as online training. Teachers have been using it for decades to motivate their young students, but L&D professionals are now discovering its great potential for corporate training as well.

 

4. Enable mLearning for All Trainees on the Move

For all the reasons stated above – busy schedules, lack of focus, and scarce motivation – your online training courses should be mobile-responsive. This is simply a requirement of the modern age. People are used to completing their daily tasks via smartphones, as mobile Internet now allows us to pay our bills, manage our private and professional relationships, and much more.

It’s only natural for online training to have its mobile version too, the one that can be accessed on the go. This is a huge time-saver that adds to the convenience of e-Learning.

 

5. Create an Environment that Caters to Extroverts

All-inclusiveness is another requirement of the modern age and is increasingly important in the workplace environment as well. But you already know that. What you may not know is that corporate training software solutions cater to this diversity by putting AI in charge of grading and eliminating bias.

This objective system has multiple benefits for extroverts. The psychological profile of extroverted people demands a special learning environment, in which trainees can thrive on social interaction and collaboration. As a strategy for online training, social learning can be achieved with e-Learning software solutions that include collaboration capabilities and gamification. Discussion boards, real-time exchange of ideas, and group brainstorming are all elements that can boost knowledge retention rates in extroverted learners.

 

6. Provide Digital Mentorship to Inspire Introverts

But what about introverts, you may ask? Extroverts are easy, but it’s the shy, silent types that require a special approach, especially when it comes to the delivery methods used in online training courses.

Corporate training software can help you with that too, once again, through innovative applications of AI technology. This is a task for digital assistants or chatbots.

In the field of online training and education, chatbots can provide digital mentorship to people who prefer an isolated approach to learning. Remember, introverted trainees will hesitate to express their opinions and seek help in addressing their points of conflict. This can significantly slow down their training.

Unlike face-to-face approaches, digital mentorship can offer expert guidance to introverted trainees, answer their questions in real time, and provide educational content on demand.

 

7. Motivate, Encourage, Incentivize, and Recognize

The last strategy we want to talk about should be an omnipresent element of your online training courses. As such, it’s less of a strategy and more of a necessity.

Recognizing your trainees’ accomplishments is not optional. If you want to deploy successful training, you need to continually boost your employees’ motivation by encouraging their professional growth and development. Now, this can always be done by issuing course completion certificates. All e-learning software solutions can help you create custom-branded diplomas. But, there’s more.

Gamification is a great motivational strategy, as it relies on tactics that help encourage participation. But it also uses badges, point scoring, quizzes, and other incentives. Whatever incentive, motivational tool or strategy you employ, it’s important to recognize your trainees’ accomplishments publicly and in real-time.

 

Final Thoughts

These seven strategies for online training deployment can be used separately, but it’s even better if they are combined for maximum performance. The key, as we’ve already mentioned, is in your corporate training software. The more feature-rich it is, the easier it will be for you and your company to create a convenient, personalized, engaging, time-efficient, and encouraging training environment.

 

Author’s Bio: Robin is a Technical Support Executive. He is an expert in various LMS and employee training software. Currently, he is a resident learning management expert at ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys cycling and sky diving. Follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter.