How can we adapt our training to the ongoing pandemic?

Many industries have been affected deeply by pandemic, and the Learning & Development trade has been affected more than many others.

After 2 years of confinement, most trainers have realized that putting in-person training materials online does not work properly, but solutions are few and far between. Many teams do not have the capability to design quality asynchronous e-learning, and they might simply not have the number of learners that would justify such an expense.

I suggest three techniques of going forward to resolve those issues, depending on your specific needs:

• Create instructions that can be followed on the job site
• Use breakout rooms during webinars
• Allow the use of search engines and video sharing websites

Create instructions that can be followed on the job site

For simple tasks, or tasks which can be broken down into small steps, you can make the training material available for use at the moment the learner needs it.

In the case of software training, especially if the software is created in-house, the ideal solution is to include instructions within the software itself. For example, a user could go to the Help menu, chose a task to perform, and the software itself will use tooltips to show the learner where to click in order to complete that task. You have probably seen this technique used by some websites when they add new features, and they tell you about them through the website itself. “Walkme” is an example of a software solution designed to do exactly that.

For manual labour, short instructional videos can be created, then made available on a tablet or computer near the work site of the employees who might need them.

For example, if your team designs a new method to clean a filter used in your manufacturing process, making the demonstration available any time a worker feels the need to watch it before performing said maintenance will reduce mistakes, and is likely to be much more useful than having the employee watch the same video at an unrelated time.

Use breakout rooms during webinars

As a trainer, when you transfer from the classroom to a webinar, you lose a lot of interactivity between you and the students. Also, it is much harder to realize when you’re starting to lose your students, even if their cameras are turned on. The connection between you and them is never the same as what it was.

This means that, if you attempt to use lectures to teach a subject, you will lose your students a lot faster in a webinar than you would in a classroom. The adaptation that will solve this problem is to use breakout rooms, a functionality already programmed into Zoom, Microsoft Teams and a lot of other videoconferencing software.

The way I handle breakout rooms is by giving the learners a question to ponder. Generally speaking, I ask them how they would apply what they have learned in their work. and give them a set amount of time to talk about this issue with a few of their peers (4 or 5 people).

To see an example where I use a breakout room, you can look at the PowerPoint presentation in my portfolio by clicking here.

Allow the use of search engines and video sharing websites

There is a secret that allows technical support to do their job, and support a large variety of applications that they never get to use themselves as a part of their daily jobs. Whenever you give them an error code, they don’t know what it means by heart. They Google it.

This solution does not work for homemade tools and processes, but for commercial software and machines, there is often a plethora of tutorials online, including many in video format, which will show how to perform specific tasks. The best tutorials, or at least the most popular ones, typically reach the top of the search results.

This means that, very often, the best training you could design is already available online, and creating it all from the ground up is likely to be a waste of resources. This is especially true of very popular software, such as Microsoft Office. It might be useful to curate lessons, or create some new lesson for a specific usage, however.

If you allow people to use the free resources to learn when they need to, it allows you to focus on creating the training that really needs to be designed from scratch, either to make it better, or to cover more pertinent subjects.