The global labor force today is dealing with twin challenges.
- First, a talent shortage in areas foreseen as most promising for companies.
- The second is the inability of existing talent to upskill and adapt to changing infrastructure and culture at the organization.
As per a study by Gartner, the essential skillsets for a job are increasing by 10% each year. At the same time, 30% of skills that were necessary three years ago for the same job will now be obsolete.
This makes enterprise training crucial for companies to succeed in today’s highly evolving and competitive environment.
Whether you are an enterprise, a startup, or a mid-sized company, upskilling your workforce is something you cannot ignore. But with the digital environment and constant updates taking place, most corporate training solutions get outdated very quickly.
To help companies tackle the most common challenges in enterprise training and find the right solutions for their needs, this article will explore the challenges and the potential ways to overcome them.
6 Common Challenges of Developing & Delivering Effective Enterprise Training
Below are some of the common challenges in enterprise training that arise as a result of the inadequacies posed by traditional methods.
1. Ineffective and Outdated Training Methods
When it comes to enterprise training, most companies still rely on traditional methodologies, which can be inadequate to deal with today’s remote or hybrid working environment.
According to the 2022 Training Industry report, 44% of small companies still use instructor-led training, while only 27% leverage blended learning solutions and virtual classrooms. For large companies, this number was 36% using instructor-led training, while 34% offered blended learning programs.
With teams working remotely, organizations need to adopt more hands-on and effective training methods, including instructor-led and blended or virtual learning methodologies.
This ensures that the learners get the best of self-paced learning and the benefits of a virtual classroom, ensuring they can ask relevant questions and get their doubts answered by an expert as needed.
2. Complex Training Programs
Another big pain point for enterprise training programs is the learner’s inability to keep pace with the program.
Most training programs seem to be focused on a particular audience or include jargons or technicalities that are not ideal for a wider audience. For example, when remote working became the new normal post the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies crafted training programs to help their non-technical resources adapt to the changes in the organization.
These programs, often curated by technical experts in the company, included several technical terms and concepts unknown to someone from a non-technical background.
Organizations can create and deliver bite-sized learning and craft the program by keeping the target audience in mind to avoid training programs becoming too complex. By breaking down concepts and lessons into bite-sized nuggets, learners can access and consume the information quickly and retain the knowledge better.
3. Difficulty Finding the Right People
When it comes to effective training, especially instructor-led courses, the onus lies in finding someone with the required expertise and experience to effectively deliver the training.
Unfortunately, such people are hard to find and often busy with other requirements for the company. As a result, training programs can introduce errors or gaps without the proper guidance, which are hard to fix later.
Companies can adopt hybrid training methodologies to reduce the dependency on a trainer. Students can learn about a concept using a self-paced and video-based learning program while having a weekly or monthly classroom with the trainer to answer queries and get a better perspective on the concepts.
Not only does it take away the burden from an individual trainer, but it also helps learners understand complex concepts better.
4. Difficulties Adapting to Changing Technologies and Working Environments
The fast-paced changes in the industry today are often too daunting for most employees, and training programs only add to this burden.
To make training more effective, companies can break down programs into smaller courses, determining the right course for each employee based on their existing skillsets, department, and level of expertise.
Companies can also use a blend of gamification in this. For example, gamified learning for employee training means transforming a classroom or training program into a fun and stimulating session.
Gamified learning is effective for soft and technical skills and helps learners develop problem-solving skills in a real-world environment.
5. Inability to Provide Real-World Use Cases for Learning
Most training programs and modules focus on teaching concepts and theory about a particular subject. Unfortunately, this creates a staff that is well-versed in a particular concept but is clueless about how or where these concepts can be implemented.
So while corporate training solutions leverage well-rounded workshops, presentations, seminars, e-learning modules, and video learning options, companies need to create a virtual environment where learners can test their skills in a safe environment and get a practical understanding of the concepts.
Some ways to introduce this include adapting simulation training methodologies or having quizzes or live projects after each lesson. This ensures that the learner also gets the opportunities to put their learnings into practical use and get hands-on experience with instant feedback to perfect the skill.
6. Lack of Employee Feedback
Finally, one of the biggest impediments to effective enterprise training is the lack of feedback within organizations.
Most training processes focus only on one-way communication. This means that the training initiative is only to tick a particular checkbox and showcase that employees are completing the course without taking any feedback from them on the program.
Without a feedback loop, even the most well-rounded training programs become ineffective in due time. Often, upgrading these programs requires simple fixes or changes, which end up piling up and making the whole program obsolete with changing times.
Hence, all training programs need to understand how well the content or delivery suits each employee and use this feedback to create better experiences for the next batch.
Final Words
Corporate training solutions must keep pace with changing times and constantly evolve as per employee feedback and challenges. Therefore, when crafting a training program, it is crucial to focus on effective training techniques and ensure that it is ideal for today’s diverse and remote working culture.
Companies can work with learning technology service providers like Hurix Digital, who provide exemplary solutions to make enterprise training effective and efficient. To know more about how you can take your enterprise training to the next level, explore the learning technology services by Hurix.
