The Current Issues With Educating Businesses' Employees

The business education market is incredibly large. Only in 2019, the total spending of corporations worldwide on training and developing their employees amounted to 744B USD. Such an enormous amount should mean that the level the received education is top quality, correct?

However, this is not the case at all. On average, three-quarters of managers are not satisfied with the staff training, and almost 70% of regular employees indicate that they don’t have enough skills and technical knowledge to fulfill the job’s requirements completely.

Seeing as how pretty much all corporations had to stop their in-person business and transfer it to the virtual realm, the pandemic quarantine might be the best time to reassess how we go about our business quite literally. Companies need to take this opportunity to rethink and revamp their training methodologies.

The topic of company education requires special attention and scrutiny, because of just how many people are outrightly displeased with the result it brings in the current form. Let’s examine what exactly makes employee education so ineffective to try and amend the problems in the future.

Corporations Encourage Learning in Bad Faith

Many employment packages at numerous companies offer ‘frequently recurring training sessions,’ but are they of any worth? There is a lot of evidence to think that companies in a try to create growth and development-facilitating environment for their employees end up making and establishing very flawed KPIs for the Staff Training department.

Many businesses do this completely on accident: they put the main focus on the meeting of a certain ‘education quota,’ instead of reaching various productivity markers as a result of said education. By measuring the quantity of training rather than its quality, numerous companies set themselves on a path for educational failure.

Training Happens in the Wrong Environment

Even in the case where the training program is well-developed and led by an amazing tutor, still, the training may end up ineffective and superfluous. When imposing an educational program on their subordinates, numerous managers forget to ask themselves one thing. The question is, “Do they require this knowledge? Do they really need to invest their time into undergoing this piece of training?”

Many team leaders and managers find themselves in this rush to increase the qualifications of the team. It blinds them to the fact they are pushing for the employees to learn senseless information that’s not related to their activity. For example, if the staff is forced to attend another ‘How to be a successful business essay writer and communicator’ course without a real need for it, the employees will simply gloss over and partially ignore received information, as it’s completely irrelevant.

Our Forgetful Nature

Another aspect that can make business training go to waste is the incorrect approach to teaching new information. Even if the learners are wanting and eager to attend some kind of professional development course, the information that they receive may not be relevant to them at all at the moment.

Let's say you were training employees in a Nevada pre-settlement funding company. You may have reviewed all the necessary information over the course of a few days, packing the information in where possible. But the learners may not have been able to implement what they learned for weeks, until they're fully trained and ready. Teaching a lot of information quickly without support through learning can make retaining this information difficult.

When humans learn something new – we need to utilize the information immediately, or we won’t be able to recall about 78% of it only after a week. It has to do with the nature of our brains, and even if the employees are learning something that they will make use of in the future, without immediate and continuous real-life application of the newly acquired knowledge: the employee will incredibly rapidly lose the information they learned during the training sessions.

Human psychology researchers recently have proven the efficiency of a relatively old learning methodology proposed in the early 20th century – spaced learning. The main idea behind it is to repeat the information to learn at predefined periods that progressively increase (for example, repeat day after, then two days after, four, eight, and so on). Thanks to this technique, people are capable of retaining over 81% of the learned information.

What to Amend in Corporate Training

The main task is, of course, to shift the focus and the methodology behind learning. As of now, employee development most commonly is just a couple of lectures with some testing sprinkled in, and that’s it. Business education has to be made into a repeatable cycle:

• Employees learn the topic’s fundamental ideas. Enough to be able to incorporate it into their work.
• They apply new information to their work as soon as possible.
• They receive comments and criticisms, and clear up problematic points with the instructor, amending their knowledge and skills.
• It repeats all the while the tutor gradually expands upon the topic and continuously gives new information.

Work Quality and Net Output Over Insignificant KPIs

Apart from the training methods and techniques, there is one thing that managers have to watch out for. It is to never conduct any training just for the sake of meeting some quota detached from the real-life situation. They always have to evaluate the necessity of any particular employee development and create a comfortable learning environment. So, a lot of responsibility regarding business education lies on the shoulders of managers.