E-learning saves times and money

COURTESY HEXAGON
UNTANGLING THE WEB: Wagner Lee, center, application engineer at Hexagon Metrology, instructs Albert Kolezi and Geoff Collins on programming at the company’s North Kingstown headquarters.
COURTESY HEXAGON UNTANGLING THE WEB: Wagner Lee, center, application engineer at Hexagon Metrology, instructs Albert Kolezi and Geoff Collins on programming at the company’s North Kingstown headquarters.

The best workers are often the busiest, which makes forcing them from their desks to learn – or teach – topics like conflict resolution or Occupational Safety and Health Administration compliance often seem counterproductive for employer and employee.
So it’s natural that companies and workers alike are being increasingly drawn to the growing number of online-training options that allow learning to happen at the desk instead of the conference room or some far-flung, out-of-office location.
From webinars to the wide range of programmed e-learning modules now available, digital training is now a central tool for many human resources departments and professional-development providers.
“We thought it was a much better way to get people exposed to different concepts and less expensive than sending them off to classrooms,” said Bob Richer, vice president of human resources at Hexagon Metrology, Inc, in North Kingstown about computer-training modules the company introduced two years ago. “The feedback is that the quality is high and it doesn’t take that much time.”
Utilization of digital training is especially high at large companies like Hexagon Metrology, an international maker of precision commercial-measurement equipment with a North American headquarters in Rhode Island and 650 employees spread throughout the United States.
Hexagon Metrology is in the process of launching a digital library of training materials for its sophisticated equipment and software and for the last two years has been utilizing a series of 10-minute video-training sessions covering a range of subjects through the company’s many departments.
On the external side, Hexagon is using digital training to supplement the extensive customer-training operation that goes along with selling complex machines in a variety of technical and specialized areas.
While it is no substitute for live, hands-on training with an instructor, Hexagon Metrology Director of Marketing and Communications William Fetter said take-home multimedia materials allow customers who have finished classes to go back and refer to the information when they need to. The company also runs periodic webinars for customers teaching them about new products or features.
At Embrace Home Loans in Middletown, Vice President and Director of Talent Development Derek Lombard said digital training has been an essential part of his company’s growth to 550 employees in 25 locations.
“We wouldn’t have been able to expand our company without webinar technology to get those employees up and running quickly,” Lombard said in an e-mail about the impact of digital training. “It is simply not practical to fly trainers across the country every time there is a need. Webinars allow us to serve more employees, more efficiently with fewer resources.”
John Poirier, a lecturer in Bryant University’s management department, said mandatory subjects such as compliance and ethics training were some of the first things to migrate from the live to digital-learning realms.
Now product training and highly technical subjects that benefit from online supplemental materials are quickly going digital as well, resulting in smaller training staffs as well as travel budgets. He noted that Woonsocket-based CVS Caremark Corp. has done a lot with digital training of its assistant pharmacists across its enormous web of stores.
“I think what it has allowed is for training staffs to be reduced,” Poirier said. “That has changed the nature of staffing of internal development. There are fewer trainers and designers and more generalists.”
In addition to the potential efficiencies, digital learning also provides opportunities for integrated, electronic testing and data tracking to give management a centralized record of what employees have learned, and when.
Of course in training, like most things, technology is not a cure-all and many experts and human resources professionals say in some cases there is no substitute for getting employees to leave their desks and focus on the material. “There are some concerns about whether people are really learning from the training, about whether they are multitasking the whole time,” Poirier said. “There is also the issue of integrity, if workers are sharing their log-in codes and getting someone else to do it for them.”
Karyn Rhodes, vice president of human resources consulting at the Cornerstone Group in Warwick, sees positives and negatives in video training and thinks some topics work better in a webinar than others.
“The real positive attributes are it is less expensive and you reach wider audiences in a larger area,” Rhodes said. “But with live training the learning curve is higher – there is a higher level of retention.”
As an example, Rhodes said workers often don’t pay close attention to sexual-harassment training when it’s done through a video, but they realize how serious it is when it’s presented in a live environment.
Lombard, at Embrace Home Loans, likened live training to a pure form of teaching that has become a luxury at many companies.
“Webinars are to professional development what television is to sports entertainment,” Lombard said by e-mail. “There will always be a core group of people who want to experience education and sports live. However, webinars and television reach more people and offer a less expensive and more convenient alternative.”
For companies that provide digital corporate-training products, holding workers’ attention and getting them to retain key information is a core mission.
Rapid Learning Institute, the Pa.-based company that provides Hexagon Metrology’s training videos, uses a technique called “chunking,” breaking up material into six-to-10-minute bites, to combat short attention spans.
“The big thing that is happening is there are more millennials, people who graduated college after 2000, in the workplace and by definition they are digital natives and they want to learn on the computer,” said Stephen Meyer, CEO of the Rapid Learning Institute. &#8226

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