6.13 Case Study: Training, Not Like It Used to Be

Imagine this scenario, you have a pile of work on your desk and as you get started, your Microsoft Outlook calendar reminds you about a sexual harassment training session in ten minutes. You groan to yourself, as you are  not looking forward to sitting in a conference room and seeing PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide. As you walk to the conference room, you run into a colleague who is taking the same training that day and commiserate on how boring this training is probably going to be. However, when you step into the conference room you see something very different.

Computers are set up at every chair with a video ready to start on the computer. The HR manager greets you and asks you to take a seat. When the training starts, you are introduced to “It takes all of us“,  a web-based training  developed at Concordia University that introduces the concepts of consent, bystander interventions, and how to deal with sexual harassment using realistic scenarios. The videos stop, and there is a recorded discussion about what the videos portrayed.

Your colleagues in the Vancouver office can see the same training, and via video conferencing, they are able to participate in the discussions. It is highly interactive and interesting. Once the training is finished, there are assignments to be completed via specific channels that have been set up for this training. You communicate about the material and complete the assignments in teams with members of your Vancouver office. If you want to review the material, you simply click on ‘review’ and the entire session or parts of the training can be reviewed.

In fact, on your bus ride home from work, you access the channels on your iPhone, chatting with a colleague in your other office about the sexual harassment training assignment you have due next week. You receive an e-mail from your HR manager asking you to complete a training assessment located in a specific channel in the software, and you happily comply because you have an entirely new perspective on what training can be.

This is the training of today. No longer do people sit in hot, stuffy rooms to get training on boring content. Training has become highly interactive, technical, and interesting owing to the number of multimedia we can use—just think of the possibilities offered by Virtual Reality! According to a joint survey from  the Business Council of Canada and Morneau Shepell Ltd. (2018) slightly more than half of respondents (51 percent) said their companies spend over $1,000 per employee annually for training.  With such a large amount of funds at stake, HR managers must develop the right training programs to meet the needs; otherwise, these funds are virtually wasted.

Questions:

1. Describe an online training/academic study you have participated in for yourself.  What did you like about it?  What did you not like about it?
2. Do you believe that pandemic has changed how companies view online training?  Why? Why not?
3. If you were to design a training program, would you design a synchronous training?  Asynchronous training?  Why make this choice?