By Christopher Koch
Training has devolved into something that we hate: Most often it’s packaged courses on how to use software or hopelessly generalized, one-off Webinars designed to reach the maximum number of people by applying the least common denominator.
To be effective, training needs to be relevant, personalized, and, most importantly, continuous. And since few companies offer money for employees to seek out their own training anymore, employees and companies need to go guerrilla on it.
Yes, occasionally the old-fashioned classroom courses will still have some value, but especially for younger employees, there must be informal programs in place so that they can grow their careers without doling out big bucks. Here are some ways to do it:
- Ditch the formal mentoring programs. Formal mentoring is like meeting with your high school guidance counselor. They usually don’t know enough about you and the context that you work in to be of much help. But by pairing mentors with employees on actual work assignments, learning becomes contextual, continuous, and much less awkward than those one-a-month check-in calls.
- Make informal mentoring scale. Training videos used to cost a fortune. Now you can put one on YouTube for nothing and use the platform to track the videos that work best. For example, if a mentor is helping a green salesperson develop a pitch, why not turn on an iPhone and record it for others? If videos are posted to a platform with social networking features (like YouTube, or an internal collaboration environment), viewers can "like" the ones they find most helpful. The endorsements make it easy for employees to quickly sort through training materials and find the information most valuable to them.
- Promote learning online. The emergence of the Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) offers companies new options for delivering training and development to a lot of people conveniently at little cost. University-sponsored MOOCs, through companies such as Coursera, offer free, self-paced courses. Organizations that want to make Coursera courses part of their formal employee training programs can sponsor a certificate program, so they can verify that workers complete their coursework. Such classes currently include "An Introduction to Corporate Finance," from the University of Pennsylvania and a genetics course from the University of Melbourne. Companies can also use the MOOC model to launch their own programs. For example, Aquent, a temporary staffing firm that specializes in placing creative and marketing professionals, recently launched a MOOC, Aquent Gymnasium, to teach skills such as web design. Aquent ended up placing 200 of the professionals who completed the first course it offered.
My colleague Elana Varon recently spoke to a bunch of experts about other ways to improve corporate training in the report 5 Ways to Make Corporate Training Deliver More ROI.
Do you have DIY training at your company? Please tell me about it.
This post originally appeared on SAP Business Innovation
