How to Integrate Modern Technology Into Your Learning Ecosystem

Navigating the new frontier of hybrid offices and remote workers can be a challenge, but not if you have the right tools.

In this webinar, Stephen Baer, Chief Creative Officer of The Game Agency, and Chris Bond, CEO of Bluewater joined forces to show you how you can integrate modern learning tools to make your training programs more engaging and more effective.

Key takeaways included:

Creating an engaged culture among remote workers
Identifying corporate pain points
Designing great training to combat these pain points
Amplifying your training with immersive assessments
Applying learning experiences created with The Training Arcade®, CenarioVR®, and Rehearsal®
Using analytics to prove training effectiveness

“Something Chris and I have been talking about offline is building culture within organizations, and at the end of the day, I think one of the things that is really important is the more that we celebrate and we upskill our existing employees, the better the culture is going to be, the better the productivity is going to be, and the better the long longevity is going to be.” - Stephen Baer

More and more organizations are turning and shifting from hiring externally to hiring internally.

When organizations do that, learning, training, talent, and development become a very, very critical resource to help drive that engagement level, but also to help people adapt to specific skills.

3 Workforce Groups

In the webinar, Stephen and Chris covered 3 distinct workforce groups and how to approach learning or training with those individuals.

These 3 groups are:

Remote team
In-person team
Non-desked team

Each of these workforce groups has different wants and needs. When it comes to the business world, we know that there's been a war for talent for a number of years and that jobs and skills are changing at a rapid pace. Therefore, it's critical and important for us to look at the process of recruiting the right individuals and developing them.

We often talk about the in-person and remote, but the non-desked team is often a forgotten group; these employees aren’t often in the conversations you see happening around hybrid work.

A non-desk worker is somebody that might be anywhere from an airline pilot to a flight attendant to a maintenance worker, to restaurant workers. There are a lot of individuals where their work location is a facility, but it's not necessarily going to be something that's sitting down at a desk.

This is a different interaction. Consider that a remote worker in many times is going to be engaged through the computer. But then you go look at those non-desk workers, who represent over 60% of the work population in North America and over 70% globally, and you’ll mostly be reaching them through mobile devices.

How do we come together in that challenge, and say, we've got to find a common way to reach all of them? Or do we blend that together? How those pieces come together becomes really really critical when we're talking about learner engagement.

Because ultimately, regardless of which these 3 groups this person falls into, there are going to still be some commonalities in the type of training that you need to do across your organization, and you want to make sure that you're hitting it and serving everyone in a way that they're best suited to learn.

Rapid Change

While the pandemic is a recent—and stark—example of rapid change, these items were really beginning to happen to us before the pandemic started. We could see it starting in 2018 or 2019. We were seeing a lot of job shifts and there was more to demand and pressure on L&D.

So how do we begin to establish the metrics around “how we measure this change?”

These changes—the high attrition, the changes in business, and the challenges of culture—are going to be around for a while.

When we look at the pain points covered in this webinar, the speed to readiness that's required right now is just amazing.

It’s almost difficult to predict what skills or capabilities are going to be required 6 to 9 months from now.

However, there's a lot of feedback from workers that says “Prepare me for the future. I want to be with your company, help prepare me.”

“So I love the fact that studies are coming back and they're very, very consistent: upskilling is absolutely critical to the future for employees and for an employer.”

There are many, many modalities to do this, but we believe that 3 deserve some real discussion.

Utilizing games
Virtual reality
Video coaching

Games

Games are great for customer service and soft skills training, especially branching ones. You can let your learner practice negotiations, going down different paths, trying out certain things, seeing what the repercussions of your decisions are, and seeing what the outcomes are going to be based on the decisions you're making.

Virtual Reality Simulations

Invite your learners into a virtual world where you can bring them through these different experiences and provide additional multimedia for them to engage with. VR is similar to how we consume content in our day-to-day world and certainly, it's just as relevant in our work world.

Video Coaching

Video coaching is critical. Why?

Through video coaching, you can provide your workers with certain message points that they need to deliver, and then review how well they do it. You can look at the words that they're using and their body language—are they using too many filler words, are they making eye contact, and more.

“The experience inside learning is critical to the engagement—we can't just provide standard learning that we provided 5 years ago or 7 years ago and expect to create engagement.” - Chris Bond

Look at tools along the lines of games, virtual reality, and video coaching to create that unique experience.

The idea here is not to make it complicated, but to make it simple—simple in a way that creates your own experience for your particular organization. And that may mean taking multiple learning applications and finding the right partner to show you a way those applications can coexist and work together.

“I think, gone are the days that we're looking at having one application that's going to be able to solve all problems. We have to look at an ecosystem that has different elements to it.”