Why Employee Training is becoming increasingly important?
For years, everyone has been talking about the need for lifelong learning in the workplace. Because knowledge becomes obsolete faster and faster. In the past, it was sufficient to complete an apprenticeship or a course of study in order to cover an entire working life with your know-how. The half-life of knowledge is shrinking and shrinking.
This is the result of digitalization. There is more and more knowledge in the world, new knowledge is constantly being added and can be digitally shared in real time. This is how new knowledge spreads at breakneck speed and replaces old knowledge. This happens much more rapidly than in the analogue paper age.
In many areas, it is almost hopeless these days to complete an apprenticeship or degree course at the age of 20 or 25 and still be able to draw on the knowledge acquired at 30 or 40. Experts talk about the skills gap and the associated reskilling and upskilling. Changes in the world of work are increasing the need for employee training: Of this, 82 percent of the human resources managers surveyed for the study “Further training trends in Germany 2018” are certain.
The good news is that while the amount of knowledge to be captured is increasing and becoming obsolete faster, it is also easier to acquire thanks to new learning media and formats such as an employee app.
Employee Training: Challenges
In the past, employee training was equivalent to face-to-face seminars. In the meantime, employees are offered many other opportunities to refresh their knowledge. For example, with the employee app, which can be used at any time and place.
This is a decisive advantage, especially for areas with a high proportion of mobile employees. This is because work is often done in shifts and employees are always on site at different times. At the same time, ongoing operations have to continue and so at most some of the employees present can be released for training – even for matters that affect everyone. Legal changes and their consequences, for example. This is where attendance seminars have always reached their limits.
Using an employee app, this content can be reliably shared with all those affected, regardless of time and place.
Employee Training: Requirements
Knowledge sharing, sure. But only to those who are actually involved. In some sectors, innovations, new findings or specifications do not always concern the entire workforce. In many sectors, people with very different qualifications work together at different levels.
In terms of qualifications, this also requires very different types of employee training. Targeted communication is important here. This can be easily achieved via an employee app, provided that it has the following functions:
- Easy content creation
Knowledge content must be created intuitively and quickly. Too much effort prevents employees or superiors from sharing new knowledge.
- Private exchange
Content that only concerns a specific group of people should be able to be exchanged in this environment and should reliably reach only those colleagues who are involved in the topic. Anything else is disruptive to the rest of the workforce.
- Reviewing learned content
It should be possible to deepen the content in a simple way, a suitable tool for this are quizzes.
Employee Training: Reality Check
Overall, Germany is lagging behind in its qualification requirements. This is shown by the “Weiterbildungsatlas 2018” of the Bertelsmann Foundation. While 12.6 percent of Germans were still participating in continuing education in 2012, this figure was down to 12.2 percent in 2015.
Lifelong learning is also not an issue in Switzerland, as the Federal Statistical Office has determined. In 2016, for example, 62.5 percent of the population aged between 15 and 75 years will have attended continuing education. However, 42 percent of the activities attended lasted less than 8 hours, 41 percent lasted between 8 and 40 hours and only 17 percent were of longer duration.
Employee Training: Current Risks
If employees do not meet their qualification requirements because their employer does not offer them enough, this can have precarious consequences for companies, which can be accompanied by penalties and warnings:
- In certain areas, for example, infringements of applicable law may occur because legal changes are not implemented correctly due to a lack of appropriate training.
Furthermore, employee training is relevant for employee retention and lower fluctuation. According to the study Recruting Trends 2018 of the University of Bamberg, the offer of further training is one of the central factors that increase the attractiveness of an employer.
Closing words
Modern employee training adapts to the needs of the employees – not vice versa. In the form of an employee app, they can be used flexibly and across all locations whenever the learner needs new content or wants to acquire it anew. The younger generation in particular appreciates the fact that they can take advantage of training opportunities via smartphone. For example during the daily commute to work.
But this is only one of many advantages. In the long term, a learning app also helps to reduce the costs of further training per employee. Because once content has been created, it can be called up again and again and updated or supplemented at any time. And: learning becomes more effective. Moreover, all learning portions can be provided in different formats: Videos, webinars, quizzes, chats and much more. In this way, different types of learners working in companies are guaranteed to find the right thing to help them make personal progress.
