Why Is Employee Training and Upskilling in Focus Across All Enterprises ?

It might seem counterproductive to focus on training and upskilling initiatives when organisations are fighting for survival and success in an extremely complex and competitive market. But in reality, when organisations are battling the skills gap and finding it hard to discover new talent, it is crucial to invest in the workforce to drive adaptability to market changes.

Emerging technologies and automation have reshaped the world of work. Technological progress and evolution are revolutionising business models, tools, tasks, and delivery modes. Enterprises and employees need the necessary digital and soft skills to take advantage of the new opportunities and navigate challenges and disruption.

Forward-thinking organisations like Amazon are embracing training and upskilling as a solution to retrain their workforce to prepare them for new opportunities by 2025. AT&T is another organisation that launched a $1 billion reskilling program for its 250,000+ employees.

Training and Upskilling in the Post-Digital Age

Enterprises are now moving into the post-digital age. This age is characterised by individualisation and instant on-demand capabilities. This individualisation caters not only to physical products and services but also to experiences.

Technological developments on these fronts are being used to service the external customer and transform workplaces. It is time for them to disrupt and change the learning and development and training landscape to ensure the success of upskilling initiatives for internal customers – the employees.

Why Does Upskilling Need an AV Upgrade?

Employee training is no more a proposition reserved only for C-Suite professionals. It is, rather, an overall growth engine that drives business success. As businesses across industries shift gears owing to the pandemic’s impact and adopt a more hybrid avatar, training and upskilling initiatives also need a digital upgrade.

Some of the existing challenges facing the organisations in delivering impactful training can be highlighted as:

Geographically Disparate Teams

Geographically disparate teams, remote workers, and on-premise workers are all working together in today’s hybrid workplace. Therefore, L&D departments have to ensure that their upskilling and training initiatives are boundaryless.

For the success of upskilling initiatives, L&D teams must ensure that they are making the right programs and training available to all at the same time. But coordinating time zones and employee availability coupled with trainer availability can become arduous, leading to sub-optimal outcomes.

Costs Associated with Physical Training

Identifying ways to reduce costs has become a strategic priority as organisations across industries come out of the pandemic-induced economic crisis. Travel expenses for trainers and subject matter experts to conduct training programs are high. The costs, however, must be covered since the cost of not upskilling the workforce is higher.

All in all, organisations are battling this catch22 scenario and trying to identify more cost-effective ways to conduct training programs without compromising on the quality of trainers.

Employee Downtime

Organisations also have to factor in employee downtime and loss of productivity when they have on-premise training programs. Many programs do not need active or real-time participation.

However, the inability to deliver programs digitally compels organisations to have their employees take time out of their busy schedules to attend training programs. For employees, the training then does not seem like a value addition but rather one more task that needs to be done. 

Upskilling programs have to become more flexible and adaptive to learner needs — they must be available anytime, anywhere. The inability to realise this negatively impacts learning outcomes and upskilling programs’ success.

Access to Experts

Dependency on hosting physical training and upskilling sessions limits talent access for organisations. Great subject matter experts are scarce, especially when it comes to areas such as new and emerging technology. Critical skill coaches and trainers are also distributed across the globe.

Flying in the experts for two-day training programs can often be prohibitive in terms of costs. Fitting their schedule to match enterprise training schedules can be daunting and limits organisational chances of delivering the best knowledge experts to their employees in case of a clash of dates. Making sure that remote workers also get access to these initiatives further becomes important and demands hybrid training dissemination.

Upskilling initiatives must look at digital alternatives to give organisations a much larger playing field and greater access to knowledge, skills, and subject matter experts.

Cutting-Edge AV Solutions to the Rescue

Cutting-edge AV solutions are now critical for organisations to develop their capacity to deliver impactful upskilling and training programs relevant to today’s work environment.

Studies reveal that the way people learn is changing. Creating the right systems and mechanisms that are relevant to today’s world of work and business is fast emerging as a strategic HR priority. Not only do enterprises need to pay attention to the quality of training programs, but they also need to upgrade the way training is delivered for program success.

As workplaces transform and become digitally driven and boundary-less, can upskilling initiatives be successful if they don’t evolve?

What Do Modern Upskilling Training Initiatives Need?

Many organisations look at enabling online training to alleviate the challenges associated with upskilling initiatives. However, these interactions are unidirectional, choppy, and unimpressive, adding to the trainee’s cognitive load. Poor outcomes of these online programs can be placed on unclear projections, sub-optimal displays, poor sound quality, and lacking interactivity.

Modern, comprehensive, and cutting-edge AV solutions are now essential to power the always-on work environment. These solutions ensure that training:

• Becomes flexible and always available to employees for greater accessibility and higher completion rates
• Facilitates immersive experiences that drive greater understanding and retention
• Provides access to the local and international subject matter and knowledge experts for better learning engagement
• Drives greater employee engagement and participation in training initiatives owing to greater accessibility
• Delivers dynamic training programs, enables interactive two-way delivery, and enables document sharing of audio, video, data, and documents
• Captures, records, and streams audio, video, and presentations over the network and/or builds a knowledge base for future use. It can also be used to create a baseline for future upskilling programs
• Enables multimedia lecterns for the presenters for ease of lecture delivery
• Accommodates trends like AR and VR to deliver more impactful upskilling programs
• Drives uniformity of training experience across remote and on-premise teams

AV Drives Modern Upskilling Programs

Cutting-edge AV solutions make upskilling and training programs relevant for the present and ready for the future. These solutions make it easier for enterprises to convert ordinary training rooms into powerful interactive classrooms. Hardware like videowalls and soundbars make the training experience clearer and more immersive. The right solutions take into account the smaller details that make a big difference. Display devices being powered by daylight view technology, for example, ensure clear projections in well-lit rooms. Sound reinforcement with the right audio systems drives greater sound clarity.

Most importantly, these solutions cater perfectly to the enterprise’s need to enable upskilling programs in a hybrid mode. Both on-premise and remote teams have a uniform training experience, and the lack of physical presence does not translate into a sub-optimal learning experience.

The new world of work demands new skills delivered in a new, upgraded avatar. In this narrative, we cannot ignore or even discount the role of the right AV hardware, solution, and design. Those who leverage the power of AV will be ahead of the curve in their upskilling initiatives. Those who don’t will eventually have to catch up. Talk to us to know how you can also scale up your learning initiatives with the power of modern AV solutions.