The Race to Find Digital Training Solutions

by John Ferrare, Enerdynamics CEO

This was not the Training Room article we had planned to publish in this edition of Energy Insider. But in a few short weeks the training world, like all our worlds, has been upended. Live seminars are cancelled for the short term. But what even is short term? May? June? All summer? The rest of 2020? Do you cancel live seminars? Delay them? Or keep them on schedule but deliver them virtually?

Findcourses.com, a marketplace for both live and online training services, conducted a survey of training buyers to see how recent circumstances have changed their perceptions and goals. A few key takeaways:

• COVID-19 has not dampened the appetite to learn: 60% of individual learners are more likely to book a course in the coming three months.
• Individual learners are most motivated to learn more in the next three months due to an increase in free time followed by a desire to prove value to current or future employers.
• There’s been an unsurprisingly strong shift to preferring digital course formats: 61% of training buyers are more likely to book online training for their employees and 43% of individual learners who usually prefer in person training are now more likely to choose an online course.
• Training providers can quickly change their course modality to increase buyer confidence. In the survey, 71% of respondents said they would feel comfortable booking if the training provider offered an online version of their chosen face-to-face course. This suggests that corporate training buyers aren’t looking for an immediate move from live courses to self-paced, they just want the session to be offered virtually.

So, for those tasked with implementing training internally, it would seem there’s a short window of opportunity to provide needed training quickly. And quite possibly in a different format than originally intended or traditionally provided. There are a few reasons this might be essential:

1. You have a workforce largely working from home. Training can serve as a unifying common denominator that employees may need right now.
2. Many now have time to devote to training that they didn’t have before (and won’t have when they go back to work).
3. When employees do go back to the office, they'll be so busy catching up that personal development will likely not be the priority. So why not act now?

At Enerdynamics we are fortunate to be able to respond quickly to client requests for alternatives. We already have a library of online courses that can be deployed within hours. We also have written resources (books and material developed in the past for executive forum prework). As such, we can offer any of our live programs virtually. We can also enrich the virtual sessions with existing digital content. In fact, we are working now with several clients to move scheduled live seminars (with durations of as little as four hours or as long as two days) to a virtual platform.

For more information on either our off-the-shelf online programs or virtual classroom experiences, contact me at 866-765-5432 ext. 700. Or e-mail me at jferrare@enerdynamics.com.

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