Why Operational Training and Knowledge Enables Employees (and You) to Keep Up with the Pace of Business

We conduct our daily lives in real-time on mobile devices, and companies use technology to move faster than ever in a competitive global marketplace.

Despite all this speed, many employees lack access to modern learning tools that keep pace with business. In fact, employees are often slowed down by workplace training and learning rather than enabled or accelerated by it.

Here are three reasons why operational training and knowledge are necessary to deliver strong business results and it’s the solution to your learning and development challenges.

1. Traditional learning can’t keep up with the speed of today’s work

To empower employees, it’s crucial to think beyond the traditional course structure and rely on modern training techniques. 

The old teach, study, test process doesn’t fit with today’s employees who want to find, learn, and do. Your employee doesn’t have time to sit through a 3-4 hour training. Learning needs to be a continuous and on-demand activity, not a one-off requirement. Operational training puts knowledge in employees’ hands so contextual learning and self-paced training are accessible anytime, anywhere, and on any device. 

Your business also doesn’t have time to take 2-3 months to develop and deliver training content. By that time, the content is already outdated. Speed in content development, creation, and delivery can be up to 60% faster, as well as more accurate with an operational training and knowledge platform that also includes collaborative content authoring tools. Both you and your employees can be ready no matter how fast things move.

2. The fast track to operational excellence

Whether it’s more efficient job execution or delivery of better customer experiences, the overall goal of employee learning and development is usually to bolster the bottom line through operational excellence. That’s your ability to do business better, faster, and cheaper. 

Now, employees want something different. Sure, a paycheck, but what many workers look for these days is the ability to learn, perform, and succeed on the job. And that’s why it’s important to ensure that your employee training solutions help employees understand how they will discover and learn information in the flow of work.

Consistent access to self-paced training, searchable digital resources, and mission-critical operational training content while on the job is how it’s done. Employees must be empowered to find the right answers at all times, which in turn lends itself nicely to operational excellence. 

3. Real-time operational training and knowledge for real-time impact

People forget new information pretty fast too. It’s important to keep this in mind so you can train new employees effectively. Bombarding new hires with too much information during onboarding has a negative effect on how much knowledge they actually retain. 

Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve reminds us how fast memory loss occurs: 42% of memorized information is forgotten in 20 minutes, and 67% is gone within a day. That’s clearly the wrong type of speed.

Impactful learning occurs when training includes immediate action. With an operational training and knowledge solution, information is always on-demand and accessible on any device, which means learning happens in the moment. This kind of active learning helps employees retain information (90% knowledge retention) and deliver better performance. 

Work moves fast. Learning must keep pace and not slow down your employees or your business. The proof is in the numbers: Net Promoter Scores (NPS) show that traditional learning systems score a -57, while modern learning tools achieve a +32 NPS. Today’s employees want—and deserve—modern tools that enable them to match expectations and perform at the speeds expected in the workplace.