Innovative Solutions Overcome Corporate Training Challenges

In today’s corporate environment, proper training and development is required to keep employees on the cutting edge of industry knowledge and practice.  For finance and accounting professionals in particular, keeping current with the fluid regulatory environment and evolving industry standards is not only important, but imperative. 

The rapidly increasing volume of critical information, coupled with the rising costs associated with incorporating it into training programs, is a significant challenge for corporate training initiatives.  This is especially true for the finance and insurance industries, which at $1,600 per learner, as cited by the 2009 Corporate Learning Factbook, are among the highest spending in terms of annual training costs. 

Exacerbating those challenges is the current economic environment, which is forcing deep across-the-board budget cuts.  As such, companies are faced with finding a better way to provide accurate, timely and effective training and development for less money.

Dealing with Reality

The rate at which pertinent information is growing and changing leaves many corporate training departments struggling just to keep up.  In many cases, regulations and requirements change so quickly that training programs are outdated before they are ever released. 

In general, corporate training departments share three top challenges regardless of industry.  These include leveraging Web 2.0 technologies for formal and informal learning, as well as “managing the organization’s talent for maximum effectiveness [and] ensuring that training and development is cost-effective during the recession but still supports corporate goals,” said Pat Galagan, executive editor, American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).

That latter challenge is particularly vexing, given the importance of training and the cost of providing effective programs.  According to the soon-to-be-released State of the Industry Report from ASTD, U.S. organizations spent $134.07 billion on employee learning and development in 2008.  Nearly two-thirds of that ($88.59 billion) was spent on the internal learning function, such as staff salaries and internal development costs.  The remainder ($45.48 billion) was allocated to external services such as workshops, vendors and external events.  That works out to an average of $1,068 spent annually per employee on training. 

Next-Generation Solutions

While managing costs is important, cutting training budgets too deeply can have serious repercussions.  This is particularly true for heavily regulated industries such as finance and accounting.  Thus, to deal with the challenge of providing cost-effective training that supports corporate goals, many companies are turning to external providers and innovative software and Internet-based solutions to fill the resource gap and manage the information flow. 

Traditional corporate training programs typically consist of a large number of documents and presentations that are stored on company servers.  More often than not, these documents are manually updated as needed, reformatted, then downloaded, printed and distributed.  It is a labor-intensive and expensive process that is prone to errors, oversights and omissions.

That is where next-generation software, Internet-based and Web 2.0 solutions come in.  By streamlining the development and maintenance process, these innovative offerings reduce costs, eliminate errors and allow for easy dissemination of key training materials when and where they are needed.  They are also flexible enough to allow for variances in how content is presented, meeting the unique learning needs and styles of each audience.

These next-generation training programs “are being developed faster through a method called rapid prototyping or iterative design, which relies on continuous user feedback during the development cycle,” said ASTD’s Galagan.  “Existing programs in digital formats can be updated quickly, often with the help of learning management software.

“Overall,” she added, “there is more emphasis on learning in shorter bursts that relate directly to work at hand and for which an entire training program is not necessary.”

LearningLinx

One such next-generation program is LearningLinx, a training development and maintenance program designed and developed by New Jersey-based Elemental Learning that can be deployed as both a hosted or client-server solution.  Through its easy-to-use interface, LearningLinx helps training designers and corporate trainers optimize the design and delivery of training while assisting in consistency of content and efficacy of design.

It seamlessly integrates all aspects of the training design process, linking content, reports and materials.  Easy access to use features and functions within a training development environment allow for individual and collaborative training design and delivery, while its intuitive tagging feature provides the flexibility to tag and track courses, content, trainers, trainees and items so that the data can be organized in a meaningful way.  These tags can be used to easily generate reports or search information.

“We create a workflow without forcing people into the structure of the workflow,” said Bruce Cameron, Vice President of Sales, Elemental Learning.  “It allows people to easily create content on the fly and link pieces together.  It also alleviates the administrative burden by making it easy to find where certain information aspects haven’t been appropriately addressed.”

LearningLinx enables links to existing content, and also guides users through the creation of new content with features including:

• Drag and Link Designer: A graphical tool for structuring learning content from curriculums and courses down to the sections and sub sections of the courses themselves
• Activity Management: The ability to connect development activities to the items related to the activities, assigning them to users and tracking their completion
• Version Control: Ensuring the correct versions of material are used in the process.  The ability to have multiple versions of the material to accommodate issues such as regional differences
• Sentence Starters: A context sensitive pop-up window used to deploy instructional design best practice, Sentence Starters works with standardized lists of phrases, checklists, definitions, etc. that can be inserted into the course design
• Reviewing: Track and review modules, courses and curriculums during the development cycle in a centralized environment, as well as keeping track of review notes from technical, instructional or managerial reviews
• Attach Files:  Add any Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Adobe Flash and PDF or video files to courses, people, or reference libraries, then make them available to the entire development team in a central and context specific location
• Security and User Control: Full user access control functionality allows or restricts features for different users of the application, including how content can be read, edited or used with other content in the system

“Whether from accounting pronouncements, new auditing standards, or internal, external or regulatory reviews, learning needs come up often in accounting firms.  They need to respond to these needs in a timely manner by either updating or reporting on existing training,” said Cameron.  “LearningLinx assists in pinpointing, cross referencing and updating sections of your training library in an efficient and timely manner.”

A typical example of this would be the recent accounting pronouncements and guidance associated with companies that received government TARP funds.  LearningLinx allows accounting firms to easily and quickly determine exactly where in their curriculum map the new content needs to be inserted.

Inclusion of the content could be based on industry lines, such as banking, courses that currently deal with related accounting pronouncements, or courses where specific competencies are covered.  The training materials are then dynamically inserted into the curriculums and courses.  Should the guidance change or be refined at a later date, these materials need only to be updated in one place. 

“In addition, should regulatory authorities or internal oversight groups request detail as to what content was covered and where it was placed in a firm’s training curriculum, LearningLinx can provide this information, to a paragraph level, in a very timely and cost efficient manner,” said Cameron.

In fact, LearningLinx has been specifically designed to allow accurate and easy access to training content, providing risk managers with greater control over the generation, control, updating and delivery of training.  It makes it particularly easy to demonstrate compliance related to training content and results, and provides an effective way to improve review and approval processes.  It also includes robust and complete reporting and instant updating.

Meeting Future Demands

Adding a sense of urgency to finding better ways to develop and maintain corporate training programs is the mass exodus of Baby Boomers from the workforce in the upcoming years.  For companies to survive, their training programs must be able to bear the burden of transferring information from one generation of workers to the next to avoid the impending information gap. 

“A massive number of people are retiring,” said Cameron.  “That is creating huge information gaps.  Massive knowledge transfer is needed between Baby Boomer and new workers.”

Innovative programs such as LearningLinx and other emerging software and Web 2.0 solutions alleviate most, if not all, of the problems companies encounter with efforts to maintain effective and accurate training.  They also leverage emerging training methodologies to maximize success.

“These tools are already making their way into many organizations,” said ASTD’s Galagan.  “Because at least 70 percent of all learning at work is informal, and these tools support informal learning very well, and so many people are already using them to connect, they have the potential to change learning quite radically.  We should expect to see more learning owned by learners, with trainers acting as mentors.”

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