Online Training

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July 2, 2012

Hellо there,

My name is Darina Todorova and Iam a sales training manager for a big telecommunication sompany in BUlgaria.

I am organizing short online training sessions for our Sales Consutants. Each session is lasting 2 hours and is on Customer Care Skills.

SO far the idea is to make the sessions every day before their working time between 7 and 9 in the morning. After the first sessions were completed the result is that only half of the invited people have taken part in them.

I would like to ask for advice of people experienced in that kind of training to tell me what are the ideal hours and time for them. Is ti better to make a schedule in normal working hours but to make people participate through their home computers.

Any advice ont he topic would be appreciated and thanks everyone in advance.

Looking forward to your suggestions,

Darina

4 Responses

markbrownskier says:

July 3, 2012 at 3:11 pm

ask them

Hi Darina

Why would you NOT do training during working hours? Seems an imposition that this training was requested to happen outside of work hours – maybe no one should be surporised that participation was so low.

I’m guessing by Online you mean something like a webinar (synchronous) not e-learning which is why it must be done at a certain time. When is the right time? Ask the learners and maybe give them a choice of sessions.

Participating using home computers – I’m guessing this may not be ideal either with regard to accessing materials behind company firewalls. Surely doing during work hours using company computers makes everything easier – just got to make sure the training is valued sufficiently that people want to do it!

Mark
User deleted says:

July 4, 2012 at 2:40 pm

Online Training

Hi Mark and thank you for your advice,

the stuff that needs to bet trained is woriking in retails stores and thats one of the main reasons why the training should not be during the working hours. Customers come in and ask and that will interruprt the trainig.

Yes you are absolutely right, it is more liek a webinar, we use any meeting application in google aps and make a meeting giving the possibility for the trainer to talk on a cam and in the same time – share the presentation.

Im really wondering how to deliver this traininig. Stuff can not be taken out of the stores and in the same time they can not be trained while being there.

Im really tempted to kjust create an E-Learning module, containing the information plus some more comments instead of the trainer’s talking and do it this way
User deleted says:

July 7, 2012 at 7:32 am
Online Training

Hi Darina,

Coming from a corporate background where we moved to a lot of online training with my job having to pester sales people to complete it I can relate to your post.

I have a couple of concerns and some areas I would consider looking at to improve completition rates.
- Asking people to complete training in their own time, without pay isn’t going to motivate them to complete the course. Your sales people are looking at this task with a "what’s in it for me" attitude. At this point I can understand why the completion rates are low. You should rethink having staff complete during work time.
- The course takes 2hrs! This is way too long for anything online. Be it a purely online course, virtual class or webinar. You need to break this course up further to be 30 – 40 min max. If you can’t do this, then if there is a way of them completing part of the course and saving it part way through this will help.
- Learning styles- – not everyone enjoys doing training online or learns best through online learning. Whilst this might not be something that is able to be changed, in theory there really should be options for blended learning. Online is not the only way of training people!
- Get feedback from your sales people about their ideas on what would motivate them to complete the course. Obviously it is a requirement for them to complete it, but some will want recognition (ie a certificate of completion), some are motivated by money (gift cards work well for this), others will be happy to do it during work hours just because it is something different. You won’t be able to make everyone happy but if you find out what motivates them as well as incorporating some of the other points above you should have more success.
Hope that helps 🙂

Lisa
pnich says:

July 11, 2012 at 9:26 am

Take-up of online sessions

Hi Darina

I agree with the others that your issue is not the actual time of day, but the fact that the company is not making time for staff to learn during working hours.

I also agree that the sessions should be a bit shorter – I’m on a course just now where sessions are 2 hours and over-running and I find myself clock-watching. We deliver 90 minutes maximum for one-to-one, and 45 minutes for demonstrations.

However in terms of people using their home computers, I could see that being quite popular, if you can manage the inevitable connectivity issues and questions which will arise. I would suggest arranging a short test session with each person who is going to connect from home.

It would be a shame to move completely to e-learning, since its a very different learning experience, but you could look at what elements of the training could be done that way in preparation for a live session, or as a follow-up to one.

Hope its at least helping to discuss this!

Philippa