eLearning: Is It the Right Fit for Your Business?

You know the value of learning and development for your employees. You’ve heard about creating a culture of learning, and how eLearning can help improve outcomes, foster better employee engagement, and build success for your organization. However, is it the right choice for your firm? Does eLearning provide a viable path forward? Is it too costly to implement? Where do you even start? In this post, we’ll touch on how to determine if eLearning is the right fit for your organization.

Check Your Turnover Rate

Does your company experience high turnover rates? It might not be “the nature of the beast”. Too many business owners assume that it’s the industry itself that makes employees jump ship when the truth is that the problem is their company and its lack of support for employee growth and development.

Sure, there are companies and even entire industries where turnover is usually high. Fast food, amusement parks, seasonal businesses, and the like generally do have a high rate of employee turnover. However, even in these situations, that doesn’t have to be the norm.

An eLearning platform can give you the means to engage employees, build them up, help them improve both personally and professionally, and even retain key talent that you need for your growth and success. If you don’t provide growth and development opportunities, though, your employees will seek them elsewhere.

You Have a Geographically Dispersed Workforce

Where are your employees located? Are they all in a central location? If not, you’ll face incredibly high costs trying to provide learning and training materials and sessions to them all.

Training hundreds of people within an organization is tricky. Training hundreds, or even thousands of people, spread around a state, a nation, or the world, can be virtually impossible without exhausting your budget. With eLearning, you can ensure that all of those employees have access to the same training materials, whether they’re located in your HQ building or on the other side of the planet. That automatically closes the disconnect and helps you stop hemorrhaging cash while ensuring that your team has the opportunity for self-development and professional growth.

You Have Multiple Groups of Employees That Require Training

Take a look at your business – how many groups there require training? At a minimum, you probably have at least some of the following needs:

• Onboarding
• Compliance training
• HR training
• Manager training
• Team training
• Professional continuous learning
• Customer training
• Partner training
• Reseller training

It’s a lot to manage, and there’s no real one-size-fits-all solution here, at least in terms of traditional learning and development systems. On the other hand, eLearning delivers the ability to provide training to each group, specific to their needs and requirements, and to do so quickly, affordably, and without the challenges that arise when trying to arrange for classroom-based learning. You’ll never find that the venue is unavailable, or that the instructor has a cold, for instance. With eLearning, you can easily create customized training for every single group within your organization.

Consider Your Training Costs

Training comes with a price tag attached. It always does. However, if your costs are soaring, but you’re not seeing a corresponding uptick in employees reaching critical milestones and/or targets, then you’re basically just pouring that money down the drain. This is a hallmark of outdated learning systems that focused on in-person lectures, textbooks, worksheets, and other unengaging methods.

Classroom-based learning may be fine for a fraction of your workforce, but the majority will not benefit from it. Not only this, but the costs can be prohibitive in the first place. With a traditional, instructor-led setup, you must pay:

• For the venue
• For the instructor’s time
• For travel to and from the venue in many cases
• For accommodations if the venue is far away
• For the creation of physical training materials
• For your employees’ time during the training
• For meals and expenses

Instead, consider the benefits of an eLearning system. Because the training is delivered virtually, you automatically omit the costs of the venue, travel and meal costs, accommodation costs, and more. Even other costs that will remain are reduced or are one-time costs that will be reduced over time. For instance, you pay for the creation of materials just once, and then they are used over and over for a long time to come.

Can You Measure Your ROI?

How much return are you seeing on your investment in training and development classes, courses, and lectures? Being able to track ROI is vital – otherwise, you can’t know if you’re seeing the results you should or if you’re simply handing over fistfuls of cash for no good reason. With traditional training, it can be hard to track return on investment. Because of that, many leaders and decision-makers ultimately ignore training or downplay its importance.

This results in a culture of ignorance, where learning is avoided. Employee engagement suffers, company performance sinks, and your ability to compete tanks. However, with an eLearning system, tracking ROI becomes simple. In-depth reporting allows you to track progress, measure information retention, and delve into factors that affect your company’s growth and stability.

Do You Need to Track Compliance Training?

Many industries require compliance training to ensure that your employees have the knowledge and education required. This runs the gamut from lawyers to nurses and numerous other professionals. However, tracking compliance training can be hard, particularly if you’re relying on outmoded systems, hardcopy records, and in-person training sessions.

An eLearning platform gives you at-a-glance information about every employee, their progress through compliance training, their scores, information retention data, and a great deal more. That reduces manual workload for administrative staff, and with a recertification system, your employees will be automatically enrolled in the appropriate compliance training.

In Conclusion

When it’s all said and done, eLearning offers the advantages, capabilities, and benefits that your business needs. No matter your industry or niche, if you have employees, then an eLearning system is vital.