How do I manage my team’s remote training needs?
Covid-19 has turned us into a nation of remote workers, but, as Nik Rawlinson explains, employees’ skills still need to be developed
Covid-19 has transformed the UK into a nation of remote workers, but your employees’ skills still need to be developed. Nik Rawlinson runs through the best home-training options.
On-the-job training remains one of the best ways to bring recruits up to speed. It’s inexpensive, effective and extends the company ethos to the next generation of employees as they learn from old hands. It’s also far more difficult now that large swathes of the workforce are working from home.
Even traditional training, delivered on-site or at third-party premises, has taken a hit. Aside from the fact that many will have to travel using public transport, which they still may not be comfortable doing, you’ll need to run more sessions so you can split staff into smaller groups, or hire a larger venue. Each solution increases costs.
Yet training isn’t something you can put on hold until the crisis is over. Poorly trained staff are more prone to making costly mistakes and less able to efficiently perform tasks that generate revenue. Moreover, a failure to invest in their development frequently leads to dissatisfaction and a greater chance that they’ll look for opportunities elsewhere.
So, how can you manage your team’s training needs when you – and they – are working remotely?
Commercial providers
Udemy, which offers consumer courses in everything from languages to line dancing, has a dedicated business offering for remote training ( business.udemy.com). It presents more than 4,000 courses across 75 categories, including IT operations, marketing, project management and personal development. Although the content is drawn from Udemy’s wider course library, it’s been curated for business use by Udemy’s own staff.
There are two business plans: Team and Enterprise. Enterprise pricing is bespoke, but the Teams plan, for between five and 20 users, costs $360 per user per year, plus tax, and aside from the course library includes a branded dashboard and custom URL, as well as mobile apps with offline learning. If you want to create and host your own custom content or opt into non-English material, you’ll need to upgrade to Enterprise, which is available for 21 seats or more.
You could alternatively give staff a personal training budget and get similar material for less. Udemy often runs time-limited sales across its course portfolio and, at the time of writing, was offering courses at £11.99 apiece. However, the benefit of a business-focused training product is the integrated analytics. Udemy offers simplified user onboarding and, once enrolled, course and employee insights. As well as tracking team members’ progress through the assigned material and their performance in module quizzes, you can monitor average time spent learning, active time per user and more, while integrating with an existing learning management system (LMS) using course and reporting APIs.
Udemy is far from the only option. Skillshare ( skillshare.com) and FutureLearn ( futurelearn.com) also have business offerings alongside their consumer lineup, and Coursera ( coursera.org) makes buying individual content simple.
Skillshare for Teams ( teams.
skillshare.com) starts at $99 per user per year for five to 49 users, giving unlimited access to its 22,000-plus courses, feedback and full user management. If you need custom reports tracking user engagement,
API access and integration with your
“As well as tracking team members’ progress, you can monitor average time spent learning, active time per user and more”
LMS, you’ll need to upgrade to the Enterprise plan, with bespoke pricing available upon enquiry.
FutureLearn for Business
( futurelearn.com/business) likewise makes it easy to track employees’ progress to make sure your training budget is being well spent even though they’re not on-site, with access to test scores, number of steps completed and comments posted. As with Coursera ( below), courses are written by university lecturers and experts from organisations, and FutureLearn also has its own team to help put together bespoke content should what’s already on offer not be quite the right fit. As well as quick-hit courses that teach narrow subjects, the platform gives you access to degrees from, among others, Coventry University, Anglia Ruskin University, the University of Glasgow and the Open University.
Coursera exclusively takes content from “top instructors from worldclass universities and companies”. It offers free courses, professional qualifications and even online degrees from the likes of the University of London and Imperial College London, University of Manchester, University of Leeds and University of Edinburgh.
Depending on the institution, an online degree can cost around half the price of a qualification studied for on-site, giving firms the opportunity to make a significant investment in their staff’s professional development at lower cost. A computer science BSc from the University of London costs between £10,592 and £15,889 online, depending on your location, and is taught by staff from the university’s Goldsmiths campus. At the cheaper end of the scale, guided projects, which aim to teach a job-relevant skill in less than two hours, start at $9.99 apiece, making Coursera a tempting proposition when plugging knowledge gaps.
Bespoke training material
The more unusual your industry – and the more niche your organisation – the more difficult you’ll find what you need through training platforms. The alternative is to commission bespoke content delivered through your own LMS using either Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) or Experience API (xAPI).
SCORM and xAPI allow you to create discrete blocks of XML content and deliver them through a corporate portal, which sits on the LMS. The content can comprise, at its most basic, written text and questions that gauge participants’ progress and performance. However, it also allows for more engaging content such as animations, video and audio. As you would expect, the more ambitious your course, the longer it will take to develop and the more it will cost.
Although the documentation for both SCORM ( scorm.com) and xAPI ( xapi.com) are widely available, the neatest solution – for those with the
“Video chat is much more tiring. Therefore, remote training sessions should ideally be kept under an hour”
resources – is to sign on with an agency experienced in developing online content for delivery through browsers and apps. They will also be able to recommend an appropriate LMS and give you a single point of contact for purchase, creation and ongoing support.
Teams and Zoom
When the UK locked down in March 2020, University of St Andrews’ trainer Jennifer Hamrick moved sessions online using Microsoft
Teams. Her blog post on the valuable lessons learned ( pcpro.link/314sta) is essential reading for anyone who wants to follow her lead, advising that managers keep things short, keep class sizes small, and assign preparatory work and homework. “People’s attention spans are greatly reduced on video calls,” she wrote, “and video chat is much more tiring. Therefore, remote training sessions should ideally be kept under an hour.”
Yet, as Hamrick acknowledges, not everything can be successfully transitioned from the physical to online classroom – particularly not those topics that require a high level of interaction or debate. In those instances, rather than provide a substandard experience, which may leave staff asking why they have wasted their time, it’s often better to put the material aside until, and if, it’s possible to restart training in person.
Takeaways
While lockdown and quarantine haven’t extended the range of training options open to companies per se, it’s forced many to consider alternatives. This is good news for staff. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution and although some will baulk at the idea of selfguided, remote instruction, an equivalent number will be relieved that they’re not forced back into the restrictive environment they assumed was behind them the day they left formal education.