Breathing life into Employee Development Trainings – An e-learning perspective

Organizations today need to constantly provide training and learning opportunities in order to keep abreast of the latest in the field and suitably satisfy the expectations of their employees. According to the Global Workforce Study 2012 (towerswatson.com/assets/pdf/2012-Towers-Watson-Global-Workforce-Study.pdf) , in addition to the compensation, job security and career advancement opportunities, Learning and Development opportunities features in the top five reasons that attracts employees to a job. To infer, organizations then must have the means to provide an organic work culture, which is fostered not only with knowledge that is required for an employee to do his or her job but re-enforcements that empower him or her to do the job well. As the study elaborates, to create ‘sustainable engagement’, the employees need ‘enablement’ – i.e. the tools, resources and support to do their job well as well as ‘energy’ which is derived from a work environment which promotes employee well-being.

With e-Learning, employee development trainings become more available, personalized, real-time and engaging. Technology has made it possible for us to view learning content on the device of our choice – desktop, laptop, smart-phone or tablet. This gives the learner constant access to training, anytime they want and anywhere they need. The learning is also personalized where the learner has the freedom to choose to learn in depth what he or she chooses and skip the parts that he or she already know. Connecting with peers, instructors and experts is possible through live-chat, discussion boards and social media. With the help of graphics and multimedia, the content is also engaging – focusing on exactly what the learners want to know.

We intend to preach only what we practice, so here are two examples of how we created sustainable employee development trainings – for two diverse clients.

The first training course was developed for a multi-national energy management company which wanted to initiate an employee program on the basic principals of Ergonomics – to keep muscle and skeletal disorders at bay that arises out of wrong posture. Considering the diverse geographical and cultural spread of the organization, a standardized delivery mechanism was necessary, that would be interactive, engaging and self-paced.

We developed the course keeping the diverse audience profile in mind and integrated innovations to make learning interesting as well as effective.

• We knew that we needed to grab the attention of the learner at the very beginning of the course, to sustain interest throughout. We began with a media-rich Splash animation with thought provoking questions for effective curiosity and enquiry arousal.

• We introduced several scenarios that reflected on real-life situations and common problems arising out of wrong posture while working or travelling. The solution too was given in the same topic, so the learner could relate to the problem as well as read up on the solution together.

• Several engaging interactivities were woven into the content to provide suitable relief from reading text as well as an opportunity to test learner retention. The interactivities were kept simple to engage but not overwhelm the learner.

• To cater to the diverse audience, the course was translated into three more languages, in addition to English. Graphics and images used were culturally diverse to avoid any kind of bias.

• Job-aids were imbedded within the course for easy and ready reference – as per the need of the learner.

The second course was developed for a consulting firm specializing in developing people-centric solutions for organizations. They wanted to create a course on ‘unconscious bias’ that creep in a workplace and hinder proactive collaboration. Since the audience profile of the course was large spread, special considerations for differently-abled learners needed to be made. The challenge was to create an interactive and engaging course which took all considerations into account.

• It was necessary that the learners were given the freedom to access the course as per their self-perceived capabilities. To address this need, two separate versions of the course was created  – one with minimal text but enhanced graphics and animations and the other with descriptive text, audio descriptions and minimal interactivities. The learner could choose the version that would best suit him or her and proceed to learn effectively.

• The strategy worked well for both visually and hearing impaired learners. The visually impaired learners did not miss anything as audio and OST were same whereas the hearing impaired learners could see all the text onscreen without the need for a supporting audio. Second version also enabled the use of JAW reader for the visually impaired learners. The ALT (Alternate Text) images were incorporated. In addition, the videos present in the course were supported by onscreen transcript to aid the learners to read the video transcript.

• The client wanted to incorporate the option for the learner to switch to either of the modes in between without losing progress tracking of course. This would boost learner accessibility as learners could switch modes as and when deemed fit without losing the track of their progress. G-Cube implemented this strategy successfully in the courses, through necessary programming changes in the main shell of the course.

Both the courses showcased above were able to speak out to their intended audience well and deliver effective learning through well thought-out strategies. For more on our adventures in creating custom content of the diverse kind, write to in**@gc**********.net