Disagreements exist in every company. However, there are two points on which everyone agrees, from management to employees: Training should primarily focus on soft skills and offer online learning solutions. Trainers and HR developers can pull together and impress management with arguments and measures.
As part of the Workplace Learning Report 2018, 4,000 trainers, managers, and employees were surveyed on LinkedIn about their priorities in commercial training for 2018. Here, the results themselves are not only interesting, but also the differences in the weighting of individual roles. Here, trainers and HR developers can score and offer their supervisors effective solutions for typical hurdles in companies.
Three Hurdles in Professional Development
The study shows that companies essentially create three recurring barriers to successful training measures:
Lack of Time
Automation
Hard Boundaries in Large Companies
The Lack of Time is the most pressing and obvious barrier for employees to effectively utilize training measures. This has been recognized not only by the employees themselves but also by many managers. In everyday business, there is hardly any time for pending tasks, and the pressure is high due to absences and internal delays for many employees. So when is there still time for further training and workshops?
The second barrier is called Automation. In Industry 4.0, people increasingly live with the fear that their labor will be partially or completely replaced by machines. New production and working methods also require new solutions in training so that employees can feel safe and valued in the long term.
Finally, the study shows a third barrier that may not be as obvious as the other two: The larger the company, the greater the gap often is between the top and bottom levels. Hard Boundaries between management and employees hinder innovative training measures and lead to misunderstanding as well as plain ignorance on both sides.
The Revolution: Three Solutions for Professional Development
For all three mentioned hurdles, there are solutions, as the results of the Workplace Learning Report 2018 illustrate:
Lack of Time | → Online Solutions
Automation | → Soft Skill Training
Hard Boundaries | → Communication
Online Solutions Against the Lack of Time
The solution to the acute lack of time is called Digitalization or Online Training. Even under great time pressure, there are always downtime periods in everyday work when employees can only twiddle their thumbs. Participants in digital training measures, on the other hand, can use agile online solutions to learn whenever and wherever it suits them.
According to the Workplace Learning Report, 68% of all surveyed employees indicated they preferred to learn at their workplace. Around 58% also prefer to learn at their own pace. And 40% of all respondents prefer to learn when it is most urgent. What becomes clear from these numbers is that people are very different in their learning preferences. On one hand, there is a need to deviate from rigidly prescribed learning times. On the other hand, there is a need for overall more time to be able to organize learning phases themselves.
Most companies are already fundamentally on the right track – nearly 90% of all surveyed companies already offer opportunities for online learning. However, how well these offerings meet the needs of employees is not clear from this number. A positive attitude towards online solutions is already evident here.
Soft Skill Training Against the Threat of Automation
The best solution against the replacement of workers in the form of automation is soft skill training. The explanation for this connection is quite simple: To compete against machines, we must train our human strengths. Communication, leadership ability, or role-specific skills are in high demand in 2018 and push hard skill training further back.
Communication to Loosen Hierarchies
In the survey of the Workplace Learning Report 2018, 56% of all surveyed employees stated that they would generally learn more if they received a request to do so directly from their supervisor. Communicative measures between the various levels of the company can achieve far-reaching results here.
In summary, this means: Training measures in 2018 should be structured in such a way that self-directed learning is enabled, managers are involved, and soft skills are trained. The first two conditions are difficult to meet with conventional in-person training. On the other hand, it is precisely soft skill training that benefits from personal exchange. With a pure e-learning solution, something would be missing here.
With Blended Learning, the balance is still achieved: Trainers and participants benefit from the advantages of both worlds, online and offline.
Implementation Tips for Trainers and HR Developers
A convincing argument to management for investing more money in modern training and getting more involved: 94% of all employees surveyed in the Workplace Learning Report would stay longer at a company if it invested in their professional development. Terminations and recruiting new employees are certainly much more expensive than good training measures.
And here’s another tip for implementing the mentioned solutions: In training, specifically reference trends in the company to proactively close future skills gaps. This aspect was rated by managers in the Workplace Learning Report 2018 survey as much more important than the respondents with other roles. Trainers and HR developers could use this argument to successfully address a concern from management and thus promote their ideas.
Here is a summary of all tips:
A Matter of the Right Online Solution
In the survey of the Workplace Learning Report 2018, only 32% indicated that they observed success measurement in the form of changed behavior among participants. The previous year, this was a method used by over half of the respondents (54%). In contrast, the approval for the measurement method "Online learning content fully completed" increased from 17% in 2017 to around 33% in 2018.
Online solutions not only have the advantage of minimizing the aforementioned barriers and problems. They can also be optimally used for success measurement. Whether a large-scale final examination or a short survey after the training – with the right online tool, the successful transfer of learning content can not only be ensured but also measured.
