Formal education might stop for employees working in an organisation, but learning never comes to an end. The skills and knowledge required for the jobs today would not be relevant in the upcoming few years. Therefore, with the change in industries due to digitalisation and technological up-gradation, employers have to adopt significant methods to ensure that every employee upskills with time. Earlier, employers not only had to pay hefty fees for educating the workforce but even had to sacrifice the amount of productivity expected from them. But now, e-learning is setting trends by allowing easy incorporation of learning in the workplace.
While being accessible and affordable, e-learning benefits both employers and employees equally. Here are a few of those advantages:
For Employees
Today, employees weigh job opportunities based on incentives over salary. What they seek is personal development, and thus, on-job learning opportunities are no less than a huge incentive for them. As per LinkedIn’s Future of Skills 2019 Report, almost 2 in 5 APAC employees left a company because there were insufficient learning and development opportunities. Time, cost, and accessibility are the top 3 barriers that employees usually experience while on-job learning and all three of these can simply be tackled through e-learning. Online trainings make way for:
- Upskilling at a flexible schedule – online trainings allow the employees to manage their working hours and learning time effectively. As they don’t have to dedicate 6-8 hours continuously sitting in lectures, they can stay dedicated to their job, and take lessons when they have time. With the help of multiple tests, exercises, fun quizzes, and assignments, e-learning allows the employees to enjoy learning as per their own schedule and upskill to get better promotions.
- Self-paced learning – online trainings usually last 4-6 weeks. Moreover, it promotes the ideology of self-paced learning which allows the employees to take lessons and complete the training as per their own understanding of the concepts. Unlike traditional institutes, there are no lecturers or instructors who wait for the class to be full for proceeding with the lectures. You get the liberty to study one topic multiple times, ask your doubts, or just complete it in one go as per your convenience. You can simply cover the whole syllabus in a week, or take your time and study accordingly.
- Remembrance power – after entering the job phase, returning to learning seems monotonous at times. Online learning is proven to increase remembrance power over traditional learning. Combination of audio-visuals and other multimedia formats make the learning process fun at any age. Learners get to interact and respond accordingly instead of just consuming lectures like that in traditional classrooms.
For Employers
While focussing on employee development through e-learning, employers themselves get to enjoy uncountable privileges. In traditional learning, even after putting a lot of resources in partnering with international institutions, organisations do not get the expected return from the employees. As per the same report, 46% of Indian companies delivering L&D programmes find complications in generating employee engagement. Therefore, online trainings turn out as a credible solution for all such complications. Through the help of e-learning, employers get the opportunity to:
- Reduce expenses, increase productivity – online learning allows organisations to avoid travelling, relocation, accommodation, and other miscellaneous expenses that they bear to educate employees. When the lessons are delivered online, workers would simply learn from their own devices at any time of the day and devote themselves completely towards work. On-job training would never become a hurdle in their level of productivity.
- Educate a broader set of workers – organisations usually have their offices spread across different countries or cities and have workers with unique learning preferences. Sending everyone in the same institute to study would neither be relevant for the employees nor fulfil the organisations’ requirements. On the other hand, e-learning reaches a huge segment of employees across the globe and makes learning accessible to all the leaders and workers at different levels in an easily accessible form.
- Track employees’ progress and take feedback – online learning makes it easy for organisations to monitor their employees’ progress timely. As they learn without relocating to any other city and are present in the office on time, the employers can always discuss regarding employees’ experience, interests, and limitations that they are facing while learning. Moreover, positive learning is always reflected in the quality of their work. The gradual improvements in productivity is a sign of good on-job training program which employers can simply monitor.
Online learning prepares both employees and employers to deal with next-generation workplace challenges. It delivers the required knowledge, allows the employees to upskill, and makes them capable enough to respond proactively to the anticipated changes. For every organisation which expects the workforce to stick for long, taking proper measures is really essential. Online trainings serve the key purpose of employee development and help organisations in saving a lot of resources.
Courtesy: Internshala Trainings (training.internshala.com) – e-learning platform to learn new-age skills from Internshala.