online-learning

Assignees Have More Online Learning Options to Keep Skills Up to Date

Skill enhancement for all professionals and workers is about to accelerate. The digital era with all the challenges that technology is bringing has also been called as the age of continuous learning. But you already know that as a global mobility manager, as it is your job to find out which skills, tasks, and competencies are needed to make your assignee excel in his job — and beyond that, will always make them in demand.

Training and mentorship have always been the drivers that pushed and equipped them. But in recent years, that has been getting more difficult, if only because your assignees are zipping from one stint to another, if not from city to city.

The good news is, while technology has created this challenge, it has also made ways for you to address it with the various e-learning or digital platforms where your assignees can continually brush up their knowledge and abilities, or learn new ones.

The first and perhaps more convenient alternative is to have your assignee enroll in an online course that you vetted — or their companies subscribe to. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are the rage these days, as busy professionals can sign up for a subject they like, and then finish it at their own pace.

There are sites like Udemy, Lynda, Coursera, and Khan Academy but they are mostly for those who are new to programming. For developers looking to learn new skills, Pluralsight and Udacity are the go-to site. Stanford University has an online option for those learning business presentations, digital marketing, effective sales strategies and human resources.

While massive open online courses (MOOCs) might be the easiest options for both you and your assignee, what makes them challenging is that they are not specifically aligned with the culture and specific requirements of your company.

Finishing an MOOC can increase an assignee’s knowledge and his expertise in that specific area, but his practical application of it in your workplace might require some fine tuning. Let’s say your Indian assignee who just finished a course on sales presentation.

His sole experience is limited to his fellow Indians in New Delhi where he grew up and worked for years. However, the companies he will be pitching your product to are based in Northern California. Your assignee can use the general principles in salesmanship that he learned from the MOOC, but you have to point out to him the cultural differences that he would have to be sensitive to while in a boardroom peopled by a multi-ethnic executive teams in Silicon Valley.

Customization can come in when you or a training manager in your own company do the actual teaching — but through a virtual platform. As pointed out by

The eLearning Industry (or online learning) you and your training team can create your own learning modules which will align their objectives with that of your assignee’s tasks and overall deliverables.

Reading material and workbooks can be uploaded on project management platforms like Asana or Slack. The actual virtual training can be done through online conferences or webinars which will be scheduled in advance to accommodate the schedules of all concerned.

The beauty of this approach is that several assignees can be trained simultaneously while leaving space and time for collaboration. Dialogue can happen in real time and other feedback can just follow suit through posts on the project management platform or related chat groups. You and the training manager can also check on the progress of your assignees on a regular basis.

To make this succeed, you and everyone in the team have to agree on a regular schedule of classes which must be followed diligently. You might also consider going into the new frontier of e-learning: video.

YouTube is investing in the formation of eLearning channels in its extremely huge online ecosystem where subject-matter experts, individuals and organizations alike, will hold video tutorials on subjects like psychology, content marketing, languages, and computer programming, to name a few. Harvard University has its CS50 channel on YouTube.

It would be an educational experience in itself to browse YouTube once these channels come up. Then, with a little help from your own talented assignees who might know a lot about video editing and content creation, you can produce your own.