Having skilful employees is very important for the overall success of a business or organisation. Businesses can get everything right, but it will not make much of a difference if your employees lack the technical skills to execute your ideas. This makes it imperative that organisations train their employees and prepare them to tackle daily challenges effectively.
Equipping your employees with the right set of technical skills is never easy. There are many things you need to be mindful of in order to get things right. Fortunately, there are several ways you can alter your approach to teaching technical skills. This post will walk you through a couple of these ways and help you enhance the technical competence of your employees.
Teaching Technical Skills in a Classroom
Having a room full of people at your disposal makes it much easier to teach technical skills effectively. You can simply leverage the show-and-tell approach to get your message through to the students or employees in the classroom. This gives them first-hand experience and understanding of the subject matter, helping them better retain what you teach them.
The challenge of this approach is of course the need to get employees together in the same location at the same time. In organisations that spread across the country or even internationally and the new hybrid work place, this has become a serious challenge for the learning & development department.
Teaching Technical Skills on the Job
On-the-job training is probably the easiest and most effective way to teach technical skills to employees. This approach gives trainees the idea behind the purpose of their training and the applications of their skills. As a result, it turns out to be much simpler for trainees to grasp the concepts better and use the knowledge to their advantage.
Challenges here lie in the ability to coordinate the training with the pressures of completing day-to-day tasks.
Teaching Technical Skills Virtually
The Covid-induced lockdowns have transformed how people interact with each other. Virtual and remote interaction is the new normal for everyone now. Even most technical training is now carried out virtually. In this training mode, one can use interactive videos and animations to enhance the effectiveness of the training programs.
Training Technical Skills through ELearning
There are different levels of interactivity that can be built into virtual training. From demos to “try-me” interactive training components to working with test environments and sandboxes – depending on the type of system or technical skill you need to train, the sky is the limit.
If you have questions about the options and would like to see examples of what can be done, contact us for a free consultation.
New and Effective Ways to Teach Technical Skills
There are only a handful of ways to teach technical skills to individuals. But some of the most effective and best-known strategies to enhance technical training include;
- Micro-Learning: People take in a lot of information every day, but they barely retain most of the information. One easy way to enhance retention is by making it easier for people to take in the knowledge. This is where the microlearning tactic comes as a lifesaver with its approach of breaking larger information into smaller chunks. Having shorter technical training sessions can be very impactful.
- Just In Time Learning: The next notable approach is the just-in-time learning approach. In this case, you will need to deliver technical information to employees when needed. This approach works because it’s much easier for the human brain to retain information when learning something while doing it.
- Mobile Learning: Mobility has become a very important consideration for people living in the 21st century. Thus, mobile learning offers an excellent opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of your training program. You can assign simulated problems to trainees and allow them to solve those problems on their mobile devices.
Things That Can Influence the Effectiveness of Your Technical Training Program
Enhancing the effectiveness of your technical training programs means managing different influential factors. Some of the best-known factors that can influence the effectiveness of your technical training programs include:
- Level of Detail: Technical trainers must never be shy about diving deep into the details—the more granular your approach, the more effective your training program. Details play a key role in helping one understand different concepts, which is very important for effective technical training.
- Teach the Context: This is not to say that understanding the bigger picture is another important aspect of technical training. Knowing the detail without understanding why this is important will not lead to memorable and effective training. Ensure your learners understand that why behind each of the tasks they learn.
- Practice: Even when people acquire a new technical skill, chances are they will forget it in no time. An effective practice is one easy way to help people retain these skills and competence. As people do one thing repeatedly, it will automatically help them retain and apply the knowledge whenever necessary. So make sure trainees practice the new skill they acquire to boost retention.
- Access to Technology: Another important factor at play here is access to technology. Even though the growth and access to technology have been growing recently, many still lack access to basic technologies. Therefore, ensuring each of your trainees has seamless access to the right technology is very important.
- Risk Assessments: The final factor you need to be mindful of is the risk associated with the training program. Several factors can hamper the effectiveness of your technical training program. Thus, the best way to deal with this complexity is to assess all the risk factors and take measures to mitigate their impact.
Bottom Line
Technical training can be a resource-intensive prospect for most organisations. However, that does not mean that one must skip technical training. This training will ensure your employees are equipped with the right skill sets to help your organisation grow. As a result, you get long-term benefits that easily shadow the initial resources you pour into training the employees.
