I love sharing what I have learned, and it has become a big part of my job. I speak at conferences, run public workshops (both online and off) as well as provide in-house training for a wide variety of organisations. However, despite all that experience, I rarely encounter an organisation that really ‘gets’ training their staff or digital professionals who consider it a part of their job to educate stakeholders.
Yes, We Under Invest, But That is Not All.
Look – insert name -, this is not going to be a rant about how organisations under-invest in their staff training, although this is undoubtedly true. It is a particular bugbear of mine as organisations expect staff to embrace digital tools and working practices without giving them adequate skills to do so.
Neither is this a lecture, encouraging you to spend more time educating colleagues or clients and less time merely building what they ask for. However, that too is true.
No, this email is about how organisations typically come to me with a relatively narrow view of the type of training they require and are often not particularly open to discussing other options.
For example, one of the most common emails I receive are requests for me to come in and run a day or two training on a particular subject. Indeed, I regularly run training on user experience best practice, conversion rate optimisation and various aspects of digital transformation.
My Problem With In-Person On-Site Training
However, onsite in-person training is not always the best option. This form of learning has many downsides:
- Unless attendees immediately action what they learn, they can quickly forget what was covered, requiring refresher sessions.
- It is hard to organise because finding a time when both the trainer and all the attendees can be in a room is not easy.
- It is organisationally expensive, involving many staff members abandoning their regular work for the duration.
- Requires finding meeting space, which can be challenging for many organisations.
- Is expensive as the trainer has to be onsite and that involves travel costs.
- Isn’t particularly environmentally friendly, especially when staff have to travel to attend the workshop.
- You have to repeat sessions as staff leave, and the organisation replaces them.
Don’t get me wrong. Workshops have advantages too, and they have a time and a place. However, for many organisations, they are the square peg for the proverbial round hole.
We need to adopt a blended approach
Other organisations favour extensive documentation, while others like to send people away to conferences.
Then, of course, there are new training opportunities through self-learning video courses or digital playbooks. Not to mention remote coaching and mentorship using video conferencing tools.
However, each approach has its pros and its cons. There is no one size fits all solution, because the subject matter, individual learning styles and organisational requirements vary.
Ideally, you need a blended learning approach that combines multiple techniques to leverage the advantages of each.
We Need a Strategy as Digital is Business Critical
Advanced training for digital professionals and even introductory training for all staff is not something that you should approach on an ad-hoc basis. Digital has become too business-critical for that, and it changes too quickly to sit back and rely on existing knowledge.
To work in digital you need to be always learning and for everybody else, we need to learn those necessary skills that allow us to operate in the modern business world.
Questions We Must Be Asking
To achieve these things, our businesses need a training strategy (no matter how simple) and a budget to action that strategy.
So I leave you with some questions you need to start asking in your organisations:
- Do you have a budget for training staff in digital best practice?
- Do you have a strategy for ongoing training of staff that takes into account staff turn over and the rapid rate of change?
- Are you relying too heavily on one particular approach, or do you have a blended learning environment?
- Is there somebody in charge of ensuring everybody has the digital skills they need and are they being held accountable for actioning that?
We Cannot Ignore Training Any Longer
The eventual aim should be for digital to be as ubiquitous as electricity in our organisations. Electricity is something we all use every day without even thinking about it, and digital tools and working methodologies should be the same. However, that will not happen without investing in your staff to ensure they have the skills they need.
With that in mind, I have taken this email and turned it into a little blog post that you can pass on to those who hold the purse strings.
Let’s try and make 2020, the year to invest in our professional development and training. We can do better than the odd workshop or conference!
