Simple Tips To Boost The Effectiveness Of Your Industrial Training Efforts

While training employees is a choice for many businesses, it isn’t the case with industrial training. Manufacturing businesses operate with heavy and potentially dangerous machinery and training employees is a serious safety measure. Not to forget, most manufacturing businesses are required to train their employees because of the compliance regulations operating in their industry.

Yet, not all manufacturing businesses can claim that their employee training program is flawless. In fact, the lack of effectiveness of employee training is a common reason for accidents and mishaps in the workplace.

With that said, working out the areas of improvement in your training program can turn out to be a confusing task.

With this article, I plan on making it straightforward for you. Here are a few tips that you can employ to improve the impact of your industrial employee training initiatives:

1. Go Digital

If you are still using the traditional “reading out aloud from a presentation” training methodology, it is high time to evolve with the times. 

Today, eLearning technology allows companies to deliver more impactful training with far less investment. Let’s take the example of a learning management system (LMS). Most modern LMS are incredibly simple to use, meaning you or your employees will not need additional training to be able to experience the benefits of an LMS. 

Moreover, modern LMS also comes loaded with features like gamification, social learning, AI capabilities, AR/VR capabilities. These features, when used right, can completely revolutionize any training experience and deliver significantly better results in terms of comprehension and retention. Think about how much safer and more impactful it would be to train employees using AR technology. The great thing is that you and most of your workforce already have the devices (smartphones) needed to deliver and consume AR-based training.

Talking about the pricing, industrial & manufacturing LMS pricing is usually available in a number of models like pay-per-user or yearly licensing. This means, by choosing the right pricing structure,  you can ensure that your LMS needs don’t break your bank.

With that said, it also means that purchasing a learning management system is a task that requires a lot of consideration and research. It is recommended to start by checking out the reviews of the LMS that offer the features that you will need.

Then, you can move on to enlist yourself for free trials one by one. Based on your experience, you can make an informed decision.

It is also a good idea to test out the support of the LMS that you are trying out. This way, you can gauge the kind of response you will get if and when issues arise in the future.

2. Rethink Training Content

If you are choosing a new way to deliver training, you must ensure that your training content is optimized for digital delivery.

This means replacing long blocks of text with focused, bite-sized lessons, adding multimedia elements, creating AR training modules.

Sure, many organizations may need to depend on the expertise of external consultants to get the job done. However, the resultant training content and the way it influences the effectiveness of your training efforts will be well worth the effort.

If you plan on purchasing a feature-loaded learning management system, make sure your training content and strategy are planned in a way that enables you and your organization to take full advantage of the features that you are paying for.

3. Blend Your Training Experience

As far as the manufacturing industry is concerned, booking knowledge will not get anyone very far. It is important for training organizations and administrators to understand the same.

To truly impart knowledge that will stay with your trainees long after the actual training is complete, you must blend different methods of training.

The three methods whose combination works best for the manufacturing industry are self-paced learning, instructor-led training, and practical training which is also known as on the job training.

By combining these three training methods, you will be making your training experience more immersive, making training schedules more flexible, and making sure that your learners have hands-on experience that will allow them to execute their day to day professional responsibilities with efficiency.

Besides all those benefits, a blended training approach will also enable you to make training more obviously relevant to the trainee’s job role. 

When this happens, your learners will be more motivated to pay attention to the training that they are receiving. More motivated learners will automatically retain more knowledge and comprehend even complex subjects with relative ease.

4. Take Assessments Seriously

It has been scientifically proven that over time if the information is not reinforced, we tend to start forgetting things. It's called the forgetting curve and there is a simple way to smoothen the gradient of the curve- by repeated reinforcements.

By routinely creating situations where your learners have to recall and possibly apply the information they have learned. This way, you can ensure that whatever they are taught stays with them and can be used whenever the situation calls for it.

The simplest way to create such situations is to conduct routine assessments of your employees. With routine assessments, you can ensure your employees retain important information and that those who don’t can be trained again.

It will also ensure that your employees make actual efforts on their personal front to revise and retain the information taught to them during training.

You can make these assessments even more interesting for your employees by associating rewards and recognition with them. Something as simple as a mailer congratulating the top performers may work wonders.

If you think your employees need stronger motivation, you can consider announcing a monetary reward for the best performer of every assessment.

Conclusion

Boosting the results of your training efforts may involve making some dramatic changes to your employee training approach and strategy. With that said, going through the trouble of making these changes will be well worth the effort when you start deriving a positive ROI from your employee training budget.

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