Virtual skills training for both employees and management is critical now more than ever. But also, we live in a world, where technology continues to play a vital role to help gain success. Read below for detailing insights on this important subject.
We live in a day and age where technology rapidly evolves on a regular basis, best practices are constantly changing and shifting, and systems are undergoing daily optimization and frequent alteration.
A formal education is no longer as valuable as it once was, and even tech giants like Google, IBM, and Apple seek out individuals with exceptional flexibility, creativity, and adaptive intelligence, rather than academic accolades. Many are looking towards virtual skills training as an alternative to emphasize a continued education.
Workers today must make it a habit not just to absorb the basics, but to spend their entire careers evolving and contributing to a world that is never again going to sit still.
For employees, this means staying on the cutting edge. For management, this means investing in the means to help employees continue to learn long after school has ended.
Technology is Always Moving
It must be said that the rapid expansion of technology throughout our daily lives in the Information age has successfully integrated with every industry on the planet. Countless businesses rely on cloud technology, VOIP, a consumer internet, the ubiquity of the smartphone, and the expansive use of big data collection and complex algorithms.
As businesses are encouraged to continue the integration of new technologies, employers must look towards efficient and cheap ways of getting their workers up to speed quickly. Most businesses do not have the luxury of hiring in-house instructors, organizing training manuals, printing and sending out entire volumes of instructions on a monthly or annual basis, and planning seminars to keep employees up to spec. Things have to move faster to match the pace of the world we live in. That is where virtual skills training becomes critical.
Skill Sets are Changing
Regardless of whether you run an SME or have a managerial role within a larger corporation, virtual skills training is relevant across industries. Whenever a new technological paradigm shift presents itself, businesses – small and large – scramble to adapt and outdo the competition, taking advantage of better, faster, more reliable services in order to attract greater audiences, improve their share of the market, and invest in the future.
But if a business moves forward without taking its employees with it, it is setting itself up for failure. Training programs must be swiftly rolled out to help workers catch up and integrate new technologies into their daily processes. Whether it’s something as simple as a software change, or something far more fundamental, such as switching delivery methods, streamlining into a totally digital business, or expanding vertically at a rapid pace.
Workers Aren’t Ready
In 2019, a study by SHRM Research revealed that 83 percent of responding managers had trouble finding the right talent for their business within the last 12 months. Over a third of respondents explained that this was because they didn’t have the technical skills needed for the job.
This is a recurring problem in several different industries: a lack of upskilling, wherein many companies are finding themselves trying to meet the ever-growing demands of modernization without investing in resources to help existing and new employees learn the skills necessary to perform their tasks, after their formal education has ended.
Let’s face it; while education is important, it’s just as difficult for schools to stay on the cutting edge, and curriculums cannot be updated as swiftly as technologies evolve. Many in the workforce today are too busy or lack the resources needed to acquire new skills and must rely on management to help bridge the gap between yesterday and tomorrow.
Furthermore, many older workers suffer the most under a lack of effective training or poor training, and one in four American workers believes that they lack the technical skills necessary to perform the job they already have.
How can virtual skills training address these issues?
Distance Nullified
The first big problem when trying to create a training program to scale to the needs of today’s workforce is that you just can’t get to everyone. The experts needed to compile, write, and disseminate these training programs exist, but they can’t be in all places at once.
Virtual skills training completely eliminates this real world problem by taking things into the virtual space. This is by connecting via VOIP, cloud editing tools, and online classrooms. Experts and coaches around the world can help businesses leverage existing technologies to educate workers on existing and upcoming tools. And thus, help them become more valuable and effective workers.
Lowered Costs
Aside from cutting short on distance, virtual skills training cuts down on cost. It is estimated that virtual instructor-led training cuts down on training costs by as much as 70 percent in some cases.
Of course, at a reduced cost, businesses might appear more eager to begin overtraining their workforce, but trying to push workers to complete too many tasks at once will backfire just as much.
Yes, effective and useful virtual training can considerably improve employee satisfaction. Many workers value training because it gives them greater career options and allows them to play a greater role in the company.
Swifter Implementation
It’s fairly clear to readers at this point that hard skills change fast, and workers need to be up-to-speed on matters of data accumulation and processing, artificial intelligence, VR, and other emerging technologies that are becoming relevant in many different industries. However, it isn’t just the hard skills that are changing.
Those in the front-end and customer-facing parts of the industry must also learn how current technological leaps are affecting business, in order to help answer customer queries and offer actual solutions to recurring problems.
Furthermore, as automation continues to take humans out of the equation in simple, repetitive tasks, workers must learn to leverage that which separates them from the machines – their humanity – to better serve customers and coordinate with management. To keep up with this, training programs need to take place, which virtual skills training enables.
Virtual Training is Not Easy to Implement
Yes, virtual skills training is more effective than video or text-based learning materials, because it connects employees to knowledgeable instructors who can answer questions, clear confusion, and offer better guidance than normal reading or viewing material could. However, it is not always easy to implement.
Not every business has the infrastructure to begin implementing online training for every employee. There are also types of training that are far more effective when given in the real-world, rather than over video or VR.
Instructors train several people at once, which means they cannot always spend a disproportionate time trying to provide unique teaching styles to address every employee’s needs. Technical problems can cause delays in training, from losing internet access to a downed server.
Businesses must be aware of these issues and work on addressing them to get the most out of virtual skills training, and help their employees be the best they can be.
