This refers to the employee training, which may extend beyond the initial orientation-training period. Allows you to train your employees gradually, making sure that they learn effectively.
OLPs provide a continuous and repeatable training program for new employees, cultivating skill and knowledge.
2. Leadership development
Training centered on developing the leadership skills of the employees. Can include mentoring/coaching, and networking capabilities.
You can also provide professional qualifications and programs for your staff to complete. According to David Sun (COO of Blackboard, China), many of their client organisations work in partnership with an educational institute to provide an official course or program which can be completed on the interactive learning platform.
You can tailor the course to your specifications – you can choose how you want your staff to learn and what you want the course to focus on – whilst still giving them an official qualification once completed.
This also enables you to monitor their training, making sure they are staying up-to-date with the qualifications. You can easily find out what your staff knows and doesn’t know by tracking the results of their assessment.
3. Sales training
Engage your sales staff consistently with continuous online training.
Teach staff on new products or technical specifications as they require it.
Reduce travel costs which might be required when using other means to train the staff.
4. Customer and partner training
Providing training and important information to clients and business partners.
Train your clients and business partners on new products, let them know about conferences or meetings coming up, give them access to recordings of prior conferences/meetings and inform them of changes in procedures or processes which affect them.
Who would benefit from OLPs?
There are many types of companies or organisations who would benefit from an online learning platform. The following type of companies would benefit the most:
1. Large corporations across multiple locations
This platform provides training courses which can be completed by your employees regardless of where they are, and at any time. You can ensure that each employee is receiving the same training, and you don’t have to pay for travel and accommodation for them to get training at the organisation’s central headquarters. Furthermore, you can update them on new information at any time of the year, not having to wait until the annual staff meeting. 2. Companies/staff in industries with consistently changing practices or procedures
If your staff are in an industry that consistently evolves, such as IT or marketing, you need to provide your staff with the most up-to-date training in their industry. OLPs provide the opportunity to maintain your staff’s training consistently and effectively, ensuring that your staff are at the upmost standards in their industry. This will also motivate your employees, and ensure that they continue working with your company as you provide them with the best training possible for their area. 3. Product sales companies
This applies particularly to companies who often have changes to products or to product specifications. OLPs give management the ability to train their sales team on new products at any time, such as the week before they are released to the market, so that the sales team can immediately begin to sell the new product when it becomes available. As soon as product specifications are changed, companies can easily notify and train staff on the new specs with an OLP, ensuring staff are not providing incorrect or outdated information to customers. 4. Companies devoted to training staff and clients/business partners
A company devoted to keeping staff well trained has employees with greater motivation and a higher retention rate. Furthermore, companies dedicated to educate customers and business partners develop stronger relationships between themselves and the customers/business partners. If your company is devoted to keeping your staff trained, and consistently works at training business partners and customers, an OLP would make this task easier and more possible.
Tips for using OLPs
1. Search around – find an online learning platform which is right for your company. There are many OLPs available, and one is guaranteed to be the right one for you, depending on your budget and OLP strategy. Make sure you take into account the price, the functions available, the resources included, what technical support is included and what security is set up and available. 2. Input time and resources
Just like you would do when setting up and carrying out on-site training for staff, or seminars and conferences for clients or business partners, you have to put in some time and resources into creating this platform. You will need to appoint someone as technical manager of this site, and make sure that all the information is kept up-to-date – otherwise your staff will not be trained correctly. 3. Create engaging training courses
To ensure complete participation by staff, make sure that your training courses are engaging. The more engaging, the more successful the learning outcomes. Moreover, your staff will feel more motivated to complete the course. To make the training course engaging, use as many multimedia types as possible, particularly audio and videos. Make sure that all information is sorted into small, bite-sized pieces. Also, make sure the learning process is as interactive as possible. 4. Use the assessment and analysis tools
Use the tools provided to you by the OLP to evaluate your staff as they complete the training course. Find out what your staff know and what their knowledge gap areas are, so that you can adjust the course to focus on the latter. Find out what type of training is most effective and focus on that for the duration of the training. You might find that videos with many short multiple-choice quizzes work best, or powerpoint’s with short answer questions after every few slides.
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