Change, progress, and innovation have always been at the heart of any business endeavor. However, such evolutions are essential to a company’s survival in an increasingly crowded and competitive global market.
Improve and expand skills constantly
The breakneck speed of technological development, combined with the nearly constant volatility of the market, means that stasis in business is not an option. Businesses and employees must also change to keep pace with these changing times. Also, it’s very important for workers to improve and expand their skills constantly.
To cultivate an environment of continuous improvement, business leaders must prioritize Learning and Development (L&D). However, traditional approaches to L&D may not be sufficient in the modern era of remote and hybrid work. More than ever, upskilling involves online training through eLearning courses and live webinars.
Ensuring that your L&D webinars are engaging and effective often requires a far different approach than that used in face-to-face (F2F) training. This article presents five key tips for ensuring the success of your L&D webinars.
Define your objective(s)
The first and most important thing you can do when crafting an L&D webinar is to clarify your training mission. For example, is your webinar designed to onboard new employees and familiarize them with company policies and procedures? Is it meant to ensure compliance with corporate or governmental regulations? Such as by providing training in relevant anti-harassment or anti-discrimination labor laws? Or is it intended to help employees acquire new skills essential for performing their current job or receiving a promotion?
Once you have clearly identified the type of training your target audience needs, you will be better able to eliminate the filler. This helps you ensure that every element of your webinar is relevant to and actionable for your employees.
Read also: How to Manage Conflicts in Remote Teams Effectively
Keep it brief
One of the advantages of a webinar is that you don’t have to endure the logistical hassle of gathering your employees and stakeholders together at the same time and in the same place. This means you don’t have to feel pressured to pack everything into the training session all at once.
When it comes to a webinar, it is far better to keep things brief. Especially if you are using pre-recorded, asynchronous webinars as opposed to living, synchronous virtual meetings.
Short training modules, instead of long, convoluted sessions, will likely be far more appealing and effective for remote learners. After all, employees training remotely may be viewing your content from any number of locations. Whether from their own home with family milling about, while on the subway, or even while waiting to pick up the kids from soccer practice.
In other words, shorter sessions can mean fewer distractions and better content retention.
By the way, MyOwnConference allows creating webinars easily. Also, all attendees can view your meeting from any device and from everywhere. It allows you not to worry about time and other things.
Be interactive
Another important advantage that remote training often has over F2F seminars is that well-planned webinars can be far more visually appealing and substantially more interactive.
Webinars, for instance, should offer ample opportunities for participants to engage with the content and communicate with one another. Interactive videos with integrated quizzes and other activities will not only help attendees stay focused and interested but will also enable them to test their understanding and retention.
Similarly, the use of real-time chat platforms for synchronous training and discussion forums for asynchronous webinars is very helpful. It can provide the sense of a learning community that is so important for motivating learners. In a F2F forum, such communication may lead only to chaos. But in a webinar, these tools can help learners achieve an unprecedented level of interaction and collaboration.
Use iterative processes
No matter how much experience you have. Or how skilled you may be in crafting webinars or other forms of remote training. There’s simply no such thing as perfection. Instead, you should learn from and build upon each webinar and even each idea to improve, enhance, and innovate your training processes.
An iterative approach to the development of training webinars, for example, can be extremely beneficial if you want to avoid the dull, formulaic, and ultimately ineffective methods of the past. You are constantly exploring, experimenting, and testing the results with an iterative approach. You use the feedback of both test audiences and actual ones to determine what in your webinar works well, what you can improve, and what doesn’t work at all.
These insights are then leveraged to modify pieces of existing content and optimize future ones.
Unleash the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Another significant benefit of webinars is that you have the unique advantage of personalization. As every L&D specialist knows, no two learners are alike, making training such a formidable task. In an in-person seminar, for example, you’re required to craft your content for a rather homogeneous audience and to teach to the “average” audience member.
However, online technology enables you to harness the power of enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) to offer customized training. For instance, AI systems can use machine learning to modify training content in real-time. As a basement, it can take the systems’ analysis of the learner’s individual and specific needs. Thus, as opposed to boilerplate content, AI-driven online training courses make learning and development more relevant, efficient, and effective than ever before.
The takeaway
Upskilling is essential not only for enhancing the performance of your employees. But also it’s important for promoting the success of your business overall. In today’s increasingly dynamic and competitive market, only those companies with the most well-trained, adaptable, and multi-skilled employees will survive. However, learning and development processes in the 21st century differ significantly from those of the past, thanks largely to the ascendancy of remote work. Now more than ever, employees are being trained primarily online through both pre-recorded and live webinars. This requires corporate trainers to take a different approach than that used in face-to-face seminars.
Developing successful L&D webinars requires trainers to understand their objectives, prioritize brevity and interactivity in each session, learn from the successes and failures of past webinars, and deploy technology to support personalized learning. Don’t forget that only with MyOwnConference your webinars can be successful and powerful.
Noah Rue is a journalist and content writer, fascinated with the intersection between global health, personal wellness, and modern technology. When he isn’t searching out his next great writing opportunity, Noah likes to shut off his devices and head to the mountains to disconnect.