Top 10 Training Problems in The Workplace

Training in the workplace is important, particularly since it can help new employees integrate much more easily into the workplace environment. But training problems are not uncommon and some of them can be serious enough to hinder the learning process.

In this guide we take a look at sone of the main training problems that trainers have to contend with and how to overcome them.

Face-to-Face Training is Costly and Time Consuming

As important training can be to employees, the process can be both costly and time consuming. The Training Industry report says that U.S. companies spent more than $70.65 billion on training employees in 2016 and that the average employee spent about 53.8 hours in training.

But even if a company wants to spend less time and money on training, scaling back on training is simply not a viable move. This is especially true for companies in sectors such as finance, health care, government and other regulated industries. Yet, companies can cut costs by reducing the kind of high-quality training and face-to-face training.

One way to do that is to replace face-to-face training and orientation sessions with video-based training.  While a face-to-face training session may only be able to train one or two people at the same time, video-based training might train a significantly higher number at the same time.

Coordinating Schedules can be a Nightmare

Face-to-face training sessions can be further complicated by a the often-uphill task of coordinating schedules. The number of people whose schedules have to be considered is growing and can include the following;

• The HR representatives who are responsible for administering and coordinating the training sessions
• IT team member that may be needed to help with demonstrations
• Experts from other departments or locations
• New leaners who can easily be double booked
• High level managers who may request to sit in on the training sessions

Video-based training sessions can also help in this case since they can be easily recorded saved and then shared through various web platforms to make sure everyone gets a chance to watch the videos.

Global Training is Difficult

In person training can become even more complicated when the company in question is national and multinational. The resources and coordination required to make sure that every new recruit gets the same training can be astronomical. From renting the paces to hold the training sessions to the cost of travelling to the various locations and even the different languages that need to be used, the endeavor can be costly.

In some cases, however, video can be used as a substitute and pre-recorded videos can be streamed to each location to achieve uniformity without breaking the bank. Subtitles and captions can be used to accommodate the different levels of training needed for the different locations,

A limited Time to Capture Everything needed in the Subject Matter

Video conferencing can be a great way to share information and ideas especially when the subject matter is complex. But if the other person on the video is an expert who may not be readily available to answer your questions on demand, you may have only one chance to get everything you need.

Here, again video recording tools can be absolutely life-saving since you can easily record the interview with the expert to re-watch later. The trainee can also send a list of their questions to the expert in video format. The expert goes through the questions and creates a video with detailed responses that the trainee can use to learn.

The Brain Drain Problem

Formal training can be a great way to establish the knowledge base for new employees, particularly in industries whose processes need to be exact. Therefore, you will find that formal training is given in a deliberate and more orderly manner by a specific trainer. A video series can be essential in formal training since one video can tackle one aspect of the training session.

Informal training on the other hand can be easy going. For example, if a company has data management system that was in-house, but the employees who set it up are all retiring, they can create training videos to teach new employees how to use the system.

Learning from Smart People

While there is a lot of value in onboarding video series that can help a new employee acclimate to the new working environment, the benefits of the more organic development that can occur among employees should not be overlooked.

Also known as social learning, these forms of training can happen at the request of management and can be very important to the growth of the company. One of the ways that this type of training can be accomplished is by one of the employees creating a video tom teach new employees the inner-workings of a department.

The videos can be stored and shared on various platforms, making them accessible to the whole workforce as needed.

Boring Slide Decks

Slide decks can be very useful in the training process since they can allow you to organize content heavy information into short, sometime bulleted summations and visual media. The problem arises when many of the slide decks’ visual media fail by not using any image or videos at all. In this way, they become just another huge set of text that you need to read.

Slide decks are meant to tell a story and part of the story involves showing the trainee how certain aspects of the subject matter work. You can only effectively do that with visual medium like videos and images. One of the best ways to add new life to your Slide decks is to use GIFs and video clips. Annotated screenshots can make it easy for the trainee to follow the training sessions.

Keeping Old Training Fresh in the Trainee’s Memory

One of biggest problems with the old traditional in-person sessions or written training manuals, it is easy to forget the content. It can also be much harder to find the content when you need it. It may be very hard to find old notes from these old trainings and even determine how they fit into to the problem that you currently have.

In sharp contrast, videos can be very easy to categorize and therefore easy to find when you need them. They are also much easier to engage with and consume as compared to the thousands of pages that make up training manuals. To make old training sessions more accessible, you can record the original training and then split the video into micro-clips per topic for employees to watch when they need to.

You can also make the videos much more accessible by creating a table of contents for training. This an allow employees to only select the training video that they need. Employees can re-watch the videos as many times as they need to.

Inadequate Time for Training

The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out that it takes modern companies twice as long to hire a new employee than they did a few years ago. As a result, managers may be eager for the new recruits to get trained as quickly as possible so that they can get to work. This puts trainers under pressure to train employees in a shorter period of time.

But at the same time, hiring managers do not want to leave the new recruits too unprepared for their new jobs. One of the ways that companies are solving tis problem is by using videos to convey the information in the training sessions in a more engaging and interesting format. Managers can also add quizzes to their videos as way of determining if their employees are actually learning the content.

It is not Easy to Scale Training

As a busines grows and changes, so must its training sessions and processes. One of the ways that companies are evolving when it comes to training is in the use of new forms of media and technology to facilitate training. For instance, eLearning is quickly becoming the go-to solution for most companies. Rather than create a lot of multiple training sessions, a single session that can be updated as needed is created.

Changing or editing video content can be easy and the videos can be distributed in a number of ways to make the training accessible to all trainees. Videos can make the sharing of knowledge within the company much easier in both formal and informal learning. And given the increasing number of video tools that you can use to create the videos, the process can be easy, making training affordable and accessible to all trainees.