Employee training and education is an essential part of running any business. And, increasingly, these continuing education opportunities are taking place on digital channels.
This makes sense. Webinar-based training empowers organizations to personalize their education efforts and reduce training expenses.
But to truly see the benefits of employee training and education, employers must provide their workforce with digital experiences that empower them to learn, engage and return for more.
Here’s how.
The Benefits of Digital Training
Digital training is an easy way to ensure all employees can develop work-related skills that benefit both employer and employee. It’s a strategy that scales with your organization and can be highly personalized, empowering employees to study what interests and engages them and learn at their own pace.
Reduced Training Expenses
With digital training programs, employers no longer need to worry about coordinating in-person training sessions and everything involved with that process. That means no more having to issue reimbursement for travel and expenses or sourcing a venue in the first place.
A well-organized webinar training program also scales your employee education program globally. This strategy is useful for large enterprises because it can reinforce employee professional development regardless of region or language.
Personalized Training
An effective digital training program also allows organizations to let employees choose their own path in skill development — a major educational benefit to employers.
That’s because a traditional one-size-fits-all approach to employee education doesn’t empower employees to learn at their own pace, holding back already knowledgable employees and forcing employees who need more time with the material into a rush.
With the right webinar platform, you can test, qualify and allow employees to learn at a pace suitable for them. This allows for a natural progression in talent development and empowers employees to use their time better.
Continuing Professional Education
Finally, digital training allows your team to stay current on the ever-changing trends in your industry. A recurring lesson, say once a month, allows employees to understand changes in the industry, get updates on internal policies and more.
In addition to running a program, you can also offer employees continuing professional education credits, depending on your industry. CPE credits and certifications are a great educational benefit that can be automatically issued to eligible employees after they meet the correct criteria within your webinar. Check with a governing agency to ensure your educational program meets the correct criteria for accreditation.
A fringe benefit of regular employee education is the ability to unify your employees under a single message. It also ensures employees share the same lexicon in their day-to-day work, reducing potential confusion over internal and external terms.
Other benefits of employee education and training include:
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- Better new employee onboarding
- Higher employee retention
- Lower costs in employee training
- Increased employee engagement
Make employee engagement a part of your digital training strategy
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, internal training flops. That’s okay, but there are a few things you can do to ensure your sessions connect, engage and educate.
The primary thing to keep in mind is to ensure you’re engaging your audience. This includes your presentation and the webinar tools your employees will use to respond to and interact with your lesson.
You can take your time by choosing a webinar that we at ON24 have created. This will hopefully provide you with some inspiration. As you’re developing your training webinar, you need to think about a few things:
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- What value will this webinar bring to your team?
- What commitments do you and your team have?
- Is the content provided by the webinar engaging and compelling?
- How can attendees make the most out of the tool?
Keep in mind that you’ll make the most of an educational or training webinar by being clear on how the content of your event will add value to your team.
Four Tips for Driving Engagement During Employee Education Webinars
Successful training programs are often engaging training programs. Thankfully, modern webinar platforms provide you with a variety of tools to drive engagement and interactivity.
Check out a few tips below to see how you can ensure your employees connect with your content.
Keep it interactive
We’ve said it before and’ll say it again: engaging webinars have great presentations and, crucially, are interactive. So take advantage of the tools your webinar platform provides you. These can include polls, surveys, resource lists, certificates, CTAs, etc.
Host a Question and Answer Forum
Encourage employees to ask questions after the main portion webinar concludes or following each training session. You should want your employees to engage with your educational content and ask questions so they can have a better understanding of the material you’re presenting.
These forums can help spark innovation and breed conversation on how these ideas can be used throughout your company’s workflow. Don’t forget to tell on-demand attendees that they can still get an answer by submitting their questions to the Q&A tool.
Networking is Key
Attendees want to interact. Often, that means interacting with the speaker or other attendees within the webinar. In other words: networking.
Networking doesn’t have to be difficult in a training webinar. And you can certainly make it happen with a modern webinar platform.
Some options here include creating breakout rooms within the session. These breakouts should encourage your team to bounce ideas off each other, review learning content and help each other understand concepts and theories.
Use Webinars for Employee Education
Employee education is essential, and that’s precisely why you need to look into webinars as an education tool. They’re scalable, personalizable, provide interactivity between your company and your employees, and, most of all, they’re cost-effective.
Check out the webinar below if you want more inspiration on educational webinars and what they can look like.