Why is effective upskilling and targeted learning getting difficult across companies and distributed workforces

Viren Kapadia May 26, 2020
Why is effective upskilling and targeted learning getting difficult across companies and distributed workforces

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has only fast-tracked what was a slowly emerging trend in the corporate world – of employees increasingly choosing to work from remote locations. Thus, one of the major challenges that companies face is ensuring effective training and development of a distributed workforce. And as they have begun to figure out, it isn’t so easy. The following are the challenges they are faced with:

Difficulties in Scheduling Training Sessions

When teams are working from remote locations, individual teammates would often be taking the luxury of working as per their own convenience. Moreover, there could be employees working in different time zones if it is a team that has members from different countries. Therefore while scheduling an online training session, such vagaries need to be factored in, and often times, requires a bit of struggle to ensure all team mates are available at the same time for the session.

Difficulties in Effective Communication

When the team has members working from diverse locations, face-to-face communication is a near impossibility. Moreover, it is difficult for trainers and trainees to be available at the same time for issues such as doubt resolution. Also, individual team-mates would also find it difficult to communicate with each other when they are working from remote locations. And sadly, effective communication is essential for effective training.

Difficulties in promoting Company Culture and Team Chemistry

When companies plan training sessions, it is not just for the sake of imparting more knowledge to their employees. By getting employees to be together, and work on a set of group tasks where they apply the knowledge that they gained during the training session, companies also seek to promote synergy and the company culture among the employees. Unfortunately, most of such companies are not equipped to meet the latter objectives when they have to plan remote training for employees.

Difficulties in measuring training effectiveness

It is one thing to conduct knowledge transfer sessions over a conference call, but the difficulty later arises in trying to figure out how much of it was retained by the trainees and how serious and attentive they have been during the session. As also, it becomes difficult to conduct tests to track learning progress as also its effect on team productivity.

Lack of Learning Management Systems (LMS)

All the above-mentioned problems are primarily due to the lack of well-designed LMS in most companies. An LMS tailored to suit the requirements of the company has been proven to be able to help in tiding over all the above challenges, and in fact, carry several benefits over traditional classroom-based instruction. However, the inertial behaviour of company management of most companies when it comes to adoption of technology often poses major roadblocks for effective training.

The aforementioned points are the reasons why effective upskilling and targeted training is getting difficult in companies where team members increasingly opt to work from home or are based in different locations. One way to go about resolving the challenges is to focus on addressing the last point – the lack of an LMS. If the company truly wishes to be a thriving new-age enterprise, it is imperative that they embrace technology, and an LMS is one such tech-system that is absolutely essential in empowering the workforce to maximize their potential. And the Gyrus LMS platform has been proven to be highly effective in ensuring the same. It has in-built features to help you schedule webinars and classroom training sessions, perform a skill-gap analysis on an organizational, team, and individual employee level, evaluate feedback, and create competency ratings. If you wish to overcome the difficulties in conducting remote training, the Gyrus LMS is something you must consider integrating within your systems to aid the T&D function.