According to the 2020 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, “The budget for online training has increased by 58%, and organisations are spending significantly less (by 37%) on classroom ILT.” This statistic applies to eLearning in manufacturing and the topic we will be addressing in this article. So, when it comes to digitally training your employees, especially in the manufacturing industry, your first question might be: “How are you going to make that shift from offline to online classrooms?” “What are the special features to be considered, especially for eLearning in manufacturing?” Worry not! We have you covered!
5 Strategies to Incorporate eLearning in Manufacturing Organizations
1.Understand Your Organization’s Learning Goals
Before you even kick off the process of searching for an eLearning in manufacturing software, you should first understand your organisation’s learning goals and what the strategy is for reaching them. For a manufacturing company, the end objectives differ from other industries. For instance, you should ask your team: how does your learning and development program help your organisation reach those goals.
- Discuss the Focus Points
Your overall learning strategy would help if you also concentrated on addressing eLearning in manufacturing’s focal points. For instance, who is your end audience? Will you be training only your employees or the extended enterprise, including contractors, vendors, visitors, suppliers, and customers.
It is also necessary to consider the end use of the online components of your training program. Here, you have to take into account two components – your learning management system (LMS) and any online learning courses you use in addition. You can also think about using your online learning courses along with other training activities to create a blended corporate learning solution.
- Create a Task Force
Give the following some critical consideration too. Finalise your different LMS administrators. Distribute the powers and privileges among them. Next, identify your learning population – employees, extended enterprise, or clients? Will you give your learners the option to upload and share employee-generated learning content? Again, do you want employees to see and complete only formally assigned training? Or, do you want them to have access to your entire training library?
- Consider the Tools
The next critical consideration is to finalise your learning tools. What will your LMS include? Do you want to incorporate elements that support mentorship, discussion boards, and other similar collaboration types? Will you embed external learning content via a learning curation platform? What about an LMS that has artificial intelligence to enable customisation of training assignments. Can you make training recommendations for individual employees? Finally, do you wish to choose an LMS that comes with compatible mobile apps for mobile learning and mobile performance support?
- Finalise the Features
The last step is to take a call on your LMS features. Do you want your E Learning platform to be network installed or Cloud-based? Where do you want to deploy your LMS — on your work network or the cloud? Consider the user interface. An easy interface and user experience are acceptable. A tricky, complicated, non-intuitive one delivers a poor experience. Additionally, it would help if you also kept a lookout for reporting features.
Additional Considerations
You must ask your LMS vendor about customer support. Again, how frequently does the LMS provider update their LMS? And how do they do it? Additionally, when it comes to elearning in manufacturing, you should probably also consider how you would use your LMS for compliance-based safety training.
Conclusion
If you are from the manufacturing domain, you will reap the benefits of detailed research. Take some time and determine what you want your new LMS to do. Finally, settle on the best learning management system (LMS) for your manufacturing training needs.
