Technology's Role in Changing Training and Continuing Education for Your Employees

John Krautzel
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Technology in the workplace gives your company several opportunities to improve worker engagement in areas such as employee training and continuing education. These two facets of your company help keep employees happy and up-to-date with their jobs, and represent a way to promote people from within. Discover how technology at your office changes the way you train and educate your staff.

Why Does Technology Matter for Employee Training?

Technology isn't meant to replace humans at the office; it's supposed to make your human resources more efficient, better at their jobs and more engaged at work. Technology helps solve three main challenges with respect to employee training. First, you waste fewer materials by delivering digital training materials instead of printed ones thanks to PDF files on computers, online videos and files uploaded to mobile devices. Second, technology allows you to refine and customize training for certain groups and individuals. Third, you can create an engaging environment through gamified training that makes learning fun while employees retain more knowledge during the experience.

Continuing Education Opportunities

Technology helps employee development in two key ways. Distance learning obviates the need for a physical classroom, and employees can attend night classes or virtual classes through computers at home. When your company pays tuition reimbursement for getting good grades while attending school part time, employees have the chance to enhance their learning while earning a promotion upon completion. Not only are you paying for a high-quality education, but the employee moves up the professional ladder while staying at your company.

The other way to enhance employee training involves creating a robust in-house program. Computers create great simulation-based training that gives workers a glimpse into the future of their workplace, whether your office buys a new piece of equipment, invests in a more efficient way to do things or improves your employees' expertise.

For a warehouse environment, technology offers training on forklifts or material handlers before the hands-on training to make learning safer. Augmented reality in the medical field allows doctors to train on high-tech simulations that can save lives. Gamification of banking and finance simulations let employees at a financial institution compete to see who makes the most money on investments before making real investments with real money.

Onboarding New Workers

Onboarding new employees becomes easier with sending files through email. Instead of printing out employee manuals or handing someone tapes of training videos, just send them PDF, Word or video files through email. You could even foster a telecommuting presence this way to help employees achieve a better work-life balance. Giving employees a work-from-home option may lead to better retention and worker happiness when workers get to spend more time with family.

Setting Aside Time

Technology for employee training is great as long as you set aside enough time to get everyone involved. Consider having a festive day of training by serving food, having teams interact with each other or shutting down your normal operations for a day. This makes the experience even more fun and memorable.

Technology at the office makes employee training easier to deliver, and it helps employees stay happier with their jobs. In these respects, it saves your company money on materials and by retaining employees for longer periods of time.


Photo courtesy of IndypendenZ at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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