Unlocking Learning and Development Potential with eLearning

Current research shows that employees are now switching roles, on average, every 5 years. Whether they’re moving within the same company or industry or from sector to sector, this trend looks set to stay. This, coupled with a recent report from Docebo, discovering that employees’ value ongoing training and work-life balance more highly than in previous years, has changed many organisations induction, training and development processes.

Inform, inspire and educate

More and more Learning & Development Managers and Directors are looking towards eLearning to deliver initial and ongoing learning and development strategies.

Versatile in its nature eLearning lends itself to supporting the modern workforce in a way they relate to and understand. It replaces heavy textbook learning with quicker, bite-sized modules that are more appealing to current and future employees. It reaches graduates, apprentices and new recruits who will one day be the managers and directors themselves, with the type of content they’re used to in their everyday life. Good eLearning programs will use multi-media including video and animation, hot graphics and more to inform, inspire and educate your team.

Engage, add value and upskill

eLearning is a great way of unlocking the potential within your workforce. Working with your chosen provider, you can create customised designs and content that reflect your brand values throughout and can support the full employment cycle.

For example, it can help to create a clear, upbeat introduction and onboarding process, especially if the process is complex with lots to take in from the start. Put yourself in your new recruit’s shoes, they’ve been informed they’ve got the job, they’re excited and eager to get started. The first thing you do is send them a weekends worth of paperwork before day one… a little off-putting? Instead, imagine a link to an onboarding module, which outlines the organisational structure, career opportunities, real-life commentary from current employee’s, then how to fill in the paperwork, much more enticing!

Then imagine for example, after a year or so or following an appraisal you can offer your employee further training/support them with relevant training as part of their progression plan. A good example of this is a course we’ve recently done for a Global Aviation Company for safety managers. You’ve got it done for your existing managers, so just adapt it for new managers, or if you’ve designed it for both in the first place even better, you’re upskilling them all!

The same idea can be applied to whatever industry you’re in. The point being, you can pre-plan and create online inductions and onboarding, courses to support various career pathways giving employees’ added value throughout their employment and maximising their potential.

Blended Learning

As eLearning providers, we love everything about eLearning, that doesn’t mean to say we think it should be used in isolation. We understand some things need to be done face to face or in a classroom environment, which is part of the beauty of eLearning, it is extremely versatile and can be used to complement classroom training/ can adopt the flipped classroom approach.

It’s a no brainer really!

eLearning really can help you as an organisation unlock the potential of your brand and of your employees. Through delivering ongoing online training you will benefit from…

• Building better employee relationships
• Increasing employee loyalty.
• Improved consistency
• Improving staff engagement and retention
• Meeting/exceeding company or industry standards
• Clearly promote and demonstrate career pathways
• Upskill employee’s

Making the training flexible to fit around them is another big tick in the employee satisfaction box but also gives you peace of mind that your team are trained to meet and hopefully exceed industry or company standards. And the benefits don’t stop there, using eLearning keeps your training consistent and over time, particularly for larger organisations will save you money.

So, what does eLearning cost?

The costs obviously depend on the brief, the number of modules you’ll require and the framework you use. We use two different frameworks here at First Media.

For smaller budgets, Adapt is ideal. The Adapt framework is a rapid build system which enables us to quickly and easily create, highly interactive content for desktop and mobile applications. However, as it’s a template build, there are a limited number of options you can choose from in terms of the design.

The other option we have available in our own unique framework, which we developed in-house. Our HTML 5 framework enables customers to fully customise their courses and isn’t restricted to templated designs. This means that we have complete control over the design and structure and make the overall design and individual modules entirely bespoke. Whilst this option enables more creative freedom it tends to cost more in terms of the design and development time.

However, if you look at eLearning in terms of ROI rather than upfront costs, overtime and especially for larger businesses, it will more than pay for itself. It will pay for itself by reducing the costs of e.g. hiring conference rooms, workshops and accommodation needed for traditional training, but more importantly it delivers buy in from your employees often before their first day reducing the chances of having to spend all the time and money you do on recruitment.

Without any knowledge of the project its difficult to talk figures so if you have a course in mind, we’d love to talk to you about it.  We offer free demo’s and initial consultations so please do get in touch.

Go on, give us a bell!