How your business can benefit from using elearning

What is elearning?

Broadly speaking, elearning is any learning or training that takes place through digital means – this could be watching a quick video to learn a new process, or taking an online course over a period of several weeks, and a whole lot in between!

In the workplace, elearning is a great way of providing learning experiences for your teams. Quality elearning courses can really benefit both organisations and employees by allowing great training to be delivered with lower costs and time invested compared to face-to-face training.

What are the benefits to the organisation?

Most companies are already providing some training content for their teams. Whether that’s for compliance reasons, such as covering basic health and safety and other legal requirements, or for role-specific learning that’s tailored to a job or a team in your organisation, training is one tool to help improve performance.

A UK Government survey found that nearly half (45%) of employers that provide training would have liked to provide more training than they did. The main barriers to not providing more training were costs and staff time – something many of us will be able to relate to.

By transforming at least some of the training you already provide into elearning, you may find that you can reduce these barriers.

Delivering elearning can save on staff time. The right elearning product will allow you to create your own content quickly and easily, and once a course has been made it’s simple to enrol new learners at any time, repeating the content again and again.

When Nimble's customer FLEETCOR, a global business payments company, changed their new starter onboarding to elearning, they found that people were getting their first sales more quickly, as the elearning had a big impact on time to productivity for their new starters.

Using elearning can be cost-effective too, as cost per learner can be far lower when you don’t need to factor in room hire, catering, and other costs associated with in person training. UK Government research found that organisations investing in training spend an average of £1,530 per employee per year. Elearning solutions that include a basic package of courses start from around £25 per employee per year, and they can cover a lot of the content that you need to deliver.

As an organisation you can then be much more intentional about how you use your training budgets, reserving the more resource-heavy and expensive face-to-face training for times that you will really see the benefit, such as when group conversations are really important, or coaching and mentoring which can be highly personalised to the learner. Your whole approach to learning and development can be improved.

What are the benefits to the learners?

There are lots of reasons why the change to elearning can be a benefit to learners. Reassuringly, elearning has been shown to be effective, with research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) finding that quality digital learning can be just as effective as in-person or classroom learning.

Learners often appreciate being able to go at their own pace through the learning, rather than keeping time with the leader which may feel too fast or too slow at different times. Depending on your workplace, learners can often choose to access elearning at the time that suits them best, rather than having to try and schedule a large block of time away from their work to attend a face-to-face session. As leaders in an organisation, it’s still important that we ensure our people are able to create the time and space they need to be able to complete the elearning, but several one-hour time slots are often much easier to find and are less disruptive to teams.

By taking a quality elearning course, learners can feel more confident about how they approach their job role, and when they’re able to apply their learning they can be assured they’re performing well in their role. When non-profit organisation Cask Marque, which was set up by four breweries to drive up industry standards, created an elearning course aimed at workers in pubs and bars, completing the course helped professionalise the industry and allowed bar staff to feel proud of their work.

Organisations who invest in their people are more likely to see happier teams and better staff retention. The CIPD believe that ‘good work’ should feature, amongst other things, “opportunities to develop and ideally a sense of fulfilment” – elearning could help your teams to develop and grow.

Getting started with elearning

Whatever learning you already provide for your team, there’s a lot of best practice you probably already do that translates directly to elearning.

Before you start, think clearly about your intended outcomes and keep those in your mind as you design the course. These should help you decide if elearning is the right fit in this instance, or if another method would be better suited. Just because elearning is great for a lot of things doesn’t mean we should use it every time without consideration!

Any elearning provided in work should have a planned outcome that we can see – whether that’s safer decisions being made following health and safety training, or higher quality interactions with customers after a customer service training course. When you create an elearning course, it’s a great opportunity to ensure your messages are clear. Don’t be tempted to add in too many additional points as this can distract learners. Keep those learning outcomes in mind at all times, just like you would when designing any training course.

Any learning that has been designed with your teams’ particular roles in mind is more likely to be successful. By adding in examples that are familiar to your own staff, or even entirely co-creating the modules with teams, this increased relevance helps with motivation as people see how it will benefit them in their work.

Once you experience just how easy it is to create elearning, and your learners enjoy completing the courses, it’s a great opportunity to build momentum and begin to create a learning culture within your workplace.

Are you interested in finding out more about elearning? Find out more about what we do here at Nimble by visiting www.nimble-elearning.com where you can sign up for a free trial.