How to Give Traditional Training a Digital Upgrade

When you have a company that employs thousands of people, onboarding and training is no easy feat. Today, that has only become more complicated as tech-savvy employees expect access to training resources on their smartphones or tablets. At Inkling, we see this as an exciting opportunity for companies to take what worked well in the past—such as classroom training and paper handouts—and make it even better with digital solutions.

In this post, we explore how a training model that revolves around mobile content can enhance the way your employees learn. Here are three advantages of a new digital model, and how it might work for you:

1) Bring the classroom to your users’ fingertips.

Any major change in training strategy comes with a lot of questions: how will employees find answers to their questions? Will they engage with the material? How can they simulate real-life scenarios, if not through role-play? Certainly, there are a lot of solutions to these questions. Here at Inkling, we’ve seen our customers leverage digital content to bring a classroom-like experience to their users’ fingertips. For example, with digital content, you can:

• Turn instructor notes into annotations on detailed graphics and diagrams, or create tappable sidebars for additional context.
• Chop up your presentations into video or audio snippets to create a more enriching reader experience.
• Turn real-world scenarios into gamified interactives that a user can play through while testing their knowledge.

With the right digital content solution, there is untold potential for how you can bring your material to life.

2) Use analytics to continuously inform your content creation.

After handing your employees a binder full of paper, it’s difficult to know what they’ve read, much less if the content was well-received. Digital content, on the other hand, is primed to yield a wealth of metrics. With content analytics, you can:

• Observe classroom behaviors as a whole to discover most-visited pages.
• Learn which devices your students use the most in order to optimize content accordingly.
• Track individual user progress to see what a student read, how they performed on an assessment, and if they completed a lesson.

This data becomes even more powerful in the hands of your authors, as they continually update and improve the material. Are employees not completing a lesson? Reconsider its length or the flow. Are employees constantly struggling with a particular quiz? Maybe the questions need to be reworded or the lesson made more clear. There’s lots of adjustments that authors can make to optimize their content.

3) Harness the power of a self-paced learning model.

While digital content is primed to offer data, you can take that information a step further and integrate with a system, like an LMS, to help track and manage those results.

What’s more, the right resources should allow you to build a framework around your content that delivers data directly into your LMS. Serve up content in bite-sized chunks, then set certain performance metrics as a prerequisite to unlocking new materials. In this model, teachers don’t have to be the ones manning student progress; instead, students can complete the material at their own pace, while also ensuring that they never miss a lesson.

The Bottom Line:

With today’s advanced technology and training strategies, you have so many opportunities to help your program become even better with digital content. In the end, better learning and training systems yield better business results. Here at Inkling, that is exactly what we are excited about—empowering others to evolve and innovate when it comes to content, and, ultimately, move their business forward.