Learning and development is an undeniable need for companies nowadays. It’s because companies can get the best results for their businesses. Companies are implementing training programs to benefit their employees and ensure they reach the pinnacles of growth. Due to so much push, the eLearning industry is increasing day by day. However, companies are also realizing the importance of e-learning vendors these days.

Why are elearning vendors needed?

Companies are putting so much effort into elearning because they don’t want to rehire. In the case of rehiring, a lot of money is spent on conducting interviews, etc. Also, when the new employee has to be trained, it’s better to train the current employee. Also, the existing employee who has been working in the company for so many years has more knowledge about the processes of various departments, so upskilling him is a better option.

• Do needs analysis

Elearning vendors, today help a company take note of the skills gap through procedures like needs analysis. Indeed, over time, in-house solutions provided by the elearning department are not enough. There are many problems, like their inability to use the eLearning authoring tool and even storyboard.

But when the work is outsourced to e-learning vendors who understand the need for e-learning solutions and the procedure in detail, there can be a heavy impact in fulfilling the abyss of skills. They bring their own subject matter experts who know how to address the needs gap successfully. It should not be too late when the companies discover that they are lagging behind others due to a widening skills gap.

• Inability to introduce products:

A major symptom of a skill change is the company’s inability to launch new products in the market. Its competitors may be coming with a slew of products, but the company is lagging because it does not have enough talent for that purpose on board. A company can lose its market share due to such a laggard attitude because, over time, customers prefer better products.

The skill gap damages the companies because, in the end, they can only hire employees with certain skills. This is troublesome because they want to move in pace with their competitors but can’t do so because they can’t find someone from the market with the requisite skill.

• Higher turnover:

When people have to adjust to a job they don’t find themselves comfortable doing, they will quit. Apart from them, with declining sales, the businesses also struggle to meet their salaries. The businesses can’t deliver to the customers what they actually require; hence it’s troublesome for the former. There is going to be a major supply and demand mismatch because people with certain skill levels flood the market, but other skills are rare and overpaid.

How to go about upskilling people?

Companies need to focus on upskilling their employees, but they must consider their existing capabilities also. Some people might have skills that are not known to the senior management because an employee has not been hired in these profiles requiring these skills. Companies should make sure that these hidden employee skills are discovered and that they are upskilled accordingly. This way, the company can easily plan how to move employees between different departments.

• Hire elearning vendors:

Companies face a problem when they fail to hire elearning vendors. This can prove to be troublesome because employees can’t grasp anything from content libraries purchased by the company. The skills they imbibe from such libraries are unrelated to their roles. Every employee does not need to learn every skill; only elearning vendors can provide useful courses based on the skills required of employees.

Elearning vendors are well equipped to do their jobs and know how a skill gap can be found with a needs analysis.

Only after a needs analysis can a company determine what customized training employees require. There has been a change in the needs of the modern-day workforce due to a lack of demand by customers. Hence, the companies can’t afford so many workers. Hence, employees need to have digital literacy so that they can cope with the introduction of software at workplaces.

• Introduce upskilling:

The universities are unable to prepare employees for digitalization, which is happening in the corporate sector now. The advent of ChatGPT has also complicated matters even further when some digital skills are obsolete and no longer required. So, elearning vendors with their digital skill teaching programs can help these companies.

Companies have to focus on these upskilling programs to address their skill gaps. Since the skill gaps are huge, the elearning department is insufficient.

Companies have to take elearning vendors on board to help them to get rid of the skills gap; otherwise, they won’t be able to compete with other companies using a smarter workforce prepared through outsourcing elearning. Companies have no option rather train employees because the supply of digitally skilled labor is low in the market. The umbrella of digital skills includes many skills, such as checking emails and using MS Office. These are the basic level skills that are required for most jobs these days. But there is an advanced level of skills also being able to create software which needs programming knowledge and the caliber to upload content on an LMS or a website.

Moreover, companies are now digitalizing their supply chains to outdo their competitors; hence, employees must have digital skills.

Therefore, employees must be trained on these skills by elearning vendors for companies to advance.

There is a strong focus on training now because of the changes.

Online training is getting so much attention from companies because employees quit when they don’t get any success in their job goals.

They suffer from low morale because they feel they are not trained enough to continue their duties. The employees also feel a lack of encouragement because they suffer from continuous job insecurity due to their inability to fulfil their duties.

They don’t feel satisfied because of being employed and, as a result, suffer from burnout due to overworking to please the boss. There is, as a result, a higher payout of healthcare costs by the company leading to a shortage of profits. Therefore online training is necessary for old and new employees so that the former are more confident about their job duties. They feel relaxed that they are contributing towards their own and company goals and hence do their duties excitedly and even relevantly, not making any trial and error decisions.

Continuous learning has become necessary for employees because otherwise they can’t advance in their careers.

However, there are too many distractions in this kind of training, including surfing the internet on Smartphones. Even the notifications make a noise all the time. There are many reasons why employees drop out of courses. There are only 88% of employees who complete online courses.

Benefits of online training for employees:

• Better decision making:

With better knowledge, employees’ ideas hit the target, leading to more profits for the company. Companies must provide online training; otherwise, the employees will pursue such courses and quit their jobs. In a survey about the employees who had quit their jobs in the last 6 months or were planning to leave them in the next 6 months, 83% said there was no professional growth in their current jobs.

In this survey, most respondents were pursuing a course or had already completed the course.

Professional growth accompanied by a salary hike is also very important for employees. Hence, companies must provide short training to employees for progressing in them and to prevent them from quitting their jobs. Many topics are friendly for short-term training, like technology, finance and insurance.

• Timely help when employees don’t know something:

It’s also confusing for companies when employees should pursue the course. Indeed, the company cannot force the employees to pursue the course during office hours because that would mean they have to push their work. Also, they can’t be made to sit after office hours because that would mean missing out on family time.

The employees should be allowed to pursue the course with their schedule. Best of all, the course should have JIT components so that employees can learn from the course when they need the information.

Why employees drop out of courses?

• Don’t hold any value:

The first reason employees drop out of courses is that they have not paid for them. So they are not bothered about quitting them. For employees, such courses are free, so they don’t consider them valuable. Also, no one gets to know easily that an employee has left the course in between.

It’s not like a classroom course when you just start missing the attendance to leave the course, and everyone gets to know. But despite the accompanying embarrassment, employees are quitting the offline courses also.

Moreover, in the online learning courses, employees study alone.

Indeed, employees don’t have anyone to take help from. It can happen that an employee has been given an onboarding course where he is the only one to join the company. So, he can just consult HR for some help and noone else.

But when many employees have joined the company simultaneously, there is no dearth of consultation. You can talk to fellow joiners through a chat forum or even join them through discussion rooms. They can also video call the other employees and seek advice about how to solve a problem in the course.

• Not properly planned courses:

Unorganized courses can also cause a problem for learners when they cannot focus on them. For example, if the lessons are of 1 and half hours duration each, then the learners lose their concentration and patience. With such long lessons, it also becomes tough for the learners to retain the information.

Therefore, the lessons should be shorter durations so the learners can adjust them in their schedule, like 30 minutes. With such short-duration lessons, learners don’t need to make any special effort to study daily.

• Well structured courses:

The online training course is not perfect for all employees, especially if it is not made to order. The learners can feel bored with the information in the course and inundated because it’s irrelevant to them.

There must also be a way to make the course interesting for users. For example, there must be bullets used in the courses. With such bullets, employees can understand the course pretty well. Apart from that, concise sentences should be included in the course so that the audience does not have any trouble reading and understanding them. If employees need any resources to corroborate the information included, it must be provided to them. The best way to design any course is to include videos in it.