Johannesburg, 17 Sep 2018
Digital transformation is rapidly leading to a skills shortage that is being felt across virtually all industries. In fact, many employers are now looking to facilitate the re-skilling and upskilling of employees as a way to keep positions filled that might otherwise have remained vacant, while waiting for human resources to recruit the necessary talent.
However, it should also be remembered that in this new mobile-first and cloud-first connected world we live in, technology creates the perfect opportunity to rapidly develop the requisite skills. Moreover, when it comes to skills training and development, technology also provides the opportunity to eliminate the age-old 'sit in a classroom at the appointed time and be lectured' method of training.
Bonita Brown, group corporate sales director at CTU Training, points out that with this understanding, businesses are increasingly turning to e-learning as a way to help their employees keep pace in an increasingly dynamic and fast-moving world. In the e-learning environment, she explains, these employees not only receive a learner-centric experience, but at the same time they gain access to training any time, anywhere, and on any device.
"Studies have shown that South African corporates are failing to implement and/or monitor training processes. In fact, some 61% of organisations admit that they are failing to provide employee training programmes, while 48% of companies concede that their current training and development programmes are 'mediocre'. These findings raise further concern, with 84% of businesses considering training processes to be a major problem area," she says.
"This is where e-learning comes into the picture, as it offers a wide range of benefits that are simply not found in standard, classroom-based programmes. For one thing, e-learning courses are designed to be engaging and effective, with bite-sized modular courses crafted to appeal to the learners and to fit the company's budget. Learning paths can be designed according to industry-related job roles, and learners can obviously enrol any time they choose."
The nature of e-learning, continues Brown, is such that employees are able to go back over content multiple times, and is also flexible enough to easily accommodate holidays or sick-days. Furthermore, online support and discussion groups are available to assist with any questions or issues relating to content and good or bad experience. Employers are provided with a reports dashboard, so they can track staff training success and completion rates, she adds.
"Like e-learning, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are Internet-based courses which are free of charge and bring people together from all over the world, encouraging engagement between staff and students of a given university or institution to interact with the wider public."
MOOCs can be as beneficial as e-learning to organisations, helping employees to keep their competitive edge. These too allow learning to occur at your own pace, she indicates, allowing learners to follow their own schedule, while at the same time eliminating transport costs and prolonged, boring lectures.
"These courses expand knowledge and perspectives significantly, as participants help each other interpret the material, seek out different or related sources, and use social networking to share their interpretations in a distributed learning approach."
"With the rapid pace of technological development, most employees have realised that they will need to become lifelong learners to remain competitive in today's workplace, due to the continuous emergence of new technologies and new business practices. In other words, the skills that were required to succeed yesterday are not the same as those that will be required to succeed tomorrow. MOOCs and e-learning offer a simple and easy method for employees to remain up to date on their skills, while undertaking the necessary training in a cost-effective manner, in their own time and at their own pace," concludes Brown.
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