As the future moves towards a sea of change in the corporate sector, there is an immense need to reacquaint and orient employees in order to adapt the ever-evolving trends of this unpredictable learning landscape. Billions of people are working around the world for different organizations in keeping with these constantly changing scenarios.
The general corporate education has gone through a major transformation during the last couple of years. Today there is a plenty of advanced virtual reality and assessment tools being tested and implemented in the marketplace of the futuristic learning management systems.
Several learning experience platforms are opting for microlearning as included in the corporate education system. So with corporate sector buzzing with the new developments in the sphere of employee education and training, we can safely say that the renaissance has finally arrived. On that note, let’s carry on the discussion about what the future holds for corporate education that you should pay attention to in 2018.
- How will the employee education be carried out through Video Instructor-Led Training (VILT)?
Even though instructor- training (ILT) is often considered to be a convenient process of offering corporate education to the employees, video-based ILT (VILT) is slowly taking over this space. The required equipment to prepare a high-quality training video is comparatively cost-effective today and is easily accessible. In fact, with the appropriate audio enhancements, a high-quality video can be edited and presented on different types of smartphones.
There is a manifold of benefits to this VILT. For instance,
- There is no restriction on the number of employees who can participate in the video-based training, and what’s more the process will not depend on schedule availability or physical location.
- Each session on the process can be watched at any time, and on a video-enabled LMS system, the engagement of employees can be determined and tracked for reporting purposes.
- Also, with this process, There is an absolute uniformity in terms of providing the exact same information to the employees.
In normal ILT sessions, using different instructors may often lead to misrepresentation of the learning material. Inconsistencies like this could result in misinterpretation of the details or message meant to be conveyed through the training.
Ultimately, the assurance that you are offering a consistent message to each one of your employees is a positive aspect of VILT. Another intriguing aspect of video-based corporate education and training is the advent of interactive video-based learning that the corporate organizations are increasingly warming up to.
- Will Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality invade the space of corporate education and learning sooner than expected?
Augmented and Virtual Reality provides promising new ways to disseminate the corporate education system. In terms of technological advancements, Virtual Reality has been here for quite some time now. However, recent developments in the sphere of technology are focused to make the VR and AR systems more accessible and extremely cost-effective.
With the astounding success of Nintendo’s Pokemon Go game last year, various organizations are now willing to explore the scope of AR technology, to offer optimum corporate education to the employees.
Augmented Reality technology may be inexpensive and convenient to develop than Virtual Reality, but both these technologies are applicable for different kind of scenarios. The experience which can be gained in Virtual Reality may be best suited to teaching high-risk, complex, or dangerous procedures.
The American fast food chain KFC has plans to use VR simulations to support their employee cook training program, known as the Chicken Mastery Certification. In fact, Google Glass, Lenovo, BlackBerry and other major hardware manufacturers are now trying to venture out and explore the AR technology.
And even in case of corporate education, these systems have the scope to complement or even supersede other kinds of training formats in the upcoming years.
- How will collaboration tools enhance the range of corporate education?
When it comes to digital education, the most assumptions people make is that it will probably be app-centric. However, it’s doesn’t have to do with courses on phones; rather it is about offering the employees with the opportunity to learn no matter where they are. So instead of perceiving the process as a type of learning method, organizations should approach it as a way of learning.
The focus of the organizations aiming to offer corporate education to their employees should be on creating efficient learning and development products, which functions like a collaborative tool.
For example, employees will possibly use the new system instead of the conventional LMS to share and upload videos. In fact, one can consider systems like Workplace by Facebook, and other new collaboration tools as integrative learning methods. The advanced team management systems are bound to influence the learning landscape.
- Will content creation and marketing hold the same importance as it does today?
The importance of content creation will only amplify in the coming years in terms of corporate education. The process of content creation will play a major role in educating the employees that are a part of the corporate education system. Ability to generate fresh content in easy to use systems will provide a major push in the corporate learning space in 2018.
A staggering number of organizations are now dabbling into the content marketing space. Udemy, LinkedIn, Udacity, Skillshare, Grovo, and many others now provide thousands of expert-approved contents which are also cost-effective.
Amidst such high demand for content-driven marketing strategies, an organization will have a myriad of options to allow their employees to be acquainted with various content marketing strategies as part of their corporate learning programs.
- What will be the impact of social learning?
Social learning is another collaborative corporate learning method, which emphasizes on group experience or shared activity. Including social tools to your LMS is an excellent way to use social integration as an integral aspect of the learning experience, reinstating training materials and maintaining active engagement with the participation and discussion among the employees.
Some of these social tools come with chat boxes, which can be a great feature to use in case of corporate education, allowing for real-time interaction among the participating employees.
Forums are also quite similar to chat boxes, but are supervised by a discussion leader and are utilized for more prolonged, and precise interactions. An email system developed specifically for training, known as intramail, is another efficient way to keep learners engaged and connected with the material when not actively taking part in the discussions.
All of these techniques may be adopted by the organizations to increase the communication between different employees so that they have several areas to discuss materials and potentially collaborate on different projects.
- How can AI (Artificial Intelligence) be integrated within a corporate education system?
AI holds a lot of promise in terms of offering well-guided, customized learning experience for employees. With AI, organizations will be able to decipher employee behaviours and predict the necessity of training by suggesting content based on this information. AI can be adopted to develop a learning wizard or chatbot that can suggest training content depending on new teams, projects, career development plans; both present and future development scopes.
Using AI to identify the requirements of training and make suggestions on modules available in the LMS to address those needs is one way that learning and development will become more personalized and dedicated, and eventually will be instrumental for adding more value to the specific organization.
- How will leadership and management training impact corporate education?
Across all industries, departmental and functional barriers are blurred out, as the organizations today emphasize more on project or team-based, as part of their strategic management policies.
This calls for a leader, who possesses soft skills in team-building, collaboration, and project management, along with cross-functional knowledge and flexible, adaptive reasoning abilities.
A 2017 study found that the most prominent skill gap according to CEOs is in leadership. To deal with the skills gap in management and leadership, a proper process of corporate education must be adopted in the future.
More and more organizations today are identifying that in a fiercely competitive environment, upskilling of the employees will be beneficial for the organization as a whole.
Training and development are an integral part of a modern organization’s strategic development plans. So corporate education plays a key role in preparing the employees, to lead an organization towards growth. Now only time will tell how these methods and techniques discussed regarding corporate education system will pan out in future.
Author Bio: Patrick Austin is a business head in a reputed organization in USA, around a decade of experience in this field. He has also written blogs for management aspirants on opting for finance homework help. He has also joined MyAssignmenthelp.com/au/ as an academic expert providing assignment help.
