Five signs your staff training needs an urgent re-think

Your staff feel valued when you invest in their development. Aside from their loyalty, what’s your company getting out of your current training routine? A better-equipped workforce, or a hefty expense with very little return?

It’s easy to employ outdated and ineffective training methods simply because they’re familiar, and in most cases, they prevent your staff from reaching their full potential. Check out these five key signs that show how you could – and should – be managing your in-house training better, after which we’ll reveal how making just one change can put them right.

1. You’re still using role play

Role play is fundamentally flawed: it relies on everyone taking an active part, which can be embarrassing for less outgoing participants. It may even discourage learning as they actively seek to minimise their engagement.

It rarely replicates real-life scenarios, where the range of possible outcomes far exceeds your trainees’ imaginations, and few follow-up discussions ever go beyond the scene as it was acted out.

2. Your content is linear

Slide decks will never stretch your ablest staff. By nature, they can only present one course of action, and never allow a candidate to branch off and explore an issue in greater detail. Fixed and inflexible, they do little to help those who are struggling, either, and run the risk of skipping over areas where they need more information.

For some, running through the slides a second time might help them understand, but as this only repeats the same information, it’s unable to explain your concepts in any greater depth.

3. You set platform requirements

Your training platform must seek to capture a candidate at their most receptive. It should be easy to dip in and out whenever they have a free moment – be they commuting, waiting for an appointment, or grabbing a coffee.

If your learning platform is inaccessible from the most basic tablet or smartphone, your candidates can’t take advantage of this downtime. They’ll resent having to sit at a PC to work through a course in their free time, or they’ll do it during working hours, which costs you time and money.

4. You’re not gathering feedback

Does your Learning Management System (LMS) track your candidates’ interactions as they move through a course? Only when you know how long each participant spends within different sections, which videos they watch to the end and how many questions they answer correctly will you also know whether your course is working.

Without gathering multi-layered user metrics, passively and non-intrusively, you can’t iterate the course to optimise content and improve your business performance.

5. Nobody’s having fun

If you aren’t engaging your audience, nobody will look forward to learning. A successful interactive course is built around multimedia, quizzes and an element of gamification that challenges each candidate to better their own scores – and beat their colleagues.

With platforms like Duolingo bringing gamification to the masses, dry content with little or no interaction now just feels like hard work.If you recognise any or all of these as factors in your current training regime, it’s time to look for a more efficient, dynamic alternative, like our Accelerator.

As a scenario-based training platform, it goes beyond role play to immerse your staff in real-life situations using any device capable of running a browser – from a smartphone up. A fully gamified learning environment, it’s fun to use, both solo and in teams, and delivers live analytics through which you can continually monitor your staff and improve course content.