Engaging Employees with Virtual Instructor-Led Training

Instructor-led programs have been the cornerstone of employee training efforts since the first video boom. After all, people relate far more to a dynamic, engaged learning experience than a wall of text or an overload of images. However, the pandemic put a spoke in the wheel of businesses functionality, making traditional instructor-led training environments non-ideal as a training solution. So how do we balance the need for the ‘human touch’ in a changed business environment? Artificial intelligence, oddly, holds the key.

Changing for a New Business Landscape

In the post-pandemic landscape, it’s not just the way we deliver products that’s changed. As ‘work from home’ became the new reality, every business activity had to be reinvented, including employee onboarding and training. E-learning has become the new normal, and more and more institutions need to convert previous instructor-led training resources into e-Learning content that’s accessible, easy-to-use, and engaging for new hires.

Virtual Instructor-Led Training Programs

Sometimes, the solution was aping older formats- either finding talent in-house to create materials, or using solutions like Zoom and Google Teams to create virtual classrooms.

Over time, however, this becomes inefficient. The business cycle itself has changed, so you no longer have the ‘room full of new hires’ in one place, even if that place is virtual! Instead, you have gig-workers coming online as needed, new hires in vastly different areas needing training, and even work collaboration across borders and language barriers. To create meaningful instruction for these vastly changed circumstances needs a newer, novel approach that adapts to what the company and the learner require, instead of continuing cookie-cutter solutions for a mass training model that no longer even exists.

Overwhelming people with reams of information is no longer seen as a particularly effective training model, either, especially in an era when attention spans are shorter. And one lesson we’ve seen carry over from the marketing world is that video content is king. The ability of even a short video to impart digestible information that keeps an empathetic connection with the viewer cannot be underestimated. Employees also want more from their work training experience:

• Talent, especially specialized talent, sees reskilling and upskilling as a top priority
• Employees want to know their employer will allows them to be ‘internally mobile’ within the company- or they’re willing to become externally mobile to seek positions that appeal to them
• Online learning fits better into staff’s lives, whether working fully remotely or in the hybrid model
• Humans still like the impact of social learning, learning ‘together’ even is socially distanced

Using realistic AI to create training videos that breathe life into the subject helps foster that sense of immediacy and connection. Unlike the skilled time of a human instructor, you can create ‘microlearning’ bursts that fit the modern learning model without undue inconvenience to existing staff, and can have it ‘always on’ so staff can train and upskill as suits them and the company. From creating self-paced learning that flows, to rejuvenating dry, dull training videos from the 90s no one relates to anymore, using AI as part of your e-Learning solutions just makes sense.

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