When hiring employees, of course, you’ll hire the person you think is best suited for the job. In today’s business environment, many workplaces are dynamic, and jobs are constantly requiring new skills and knowledge. As your company’s needs grow, so must the skills and knowledge of your employees, and if want your business to stay competitive, it’s important that you make their personal development your priority.
A good workplace should always include internal infrastructure for skill development that helps employees to keep learning on the job.
It’s important to not just rely on certificate courses and industry conferences to build your workforce. The only way you can truly ensure that the skills they gain are aligned with your organization is to implement learning technologies within your company and use them constantly. In the long run, this will benefit both your employees’ careers and workplace productivity as well.
Here’s a look at some great learning technologies that exist today and how they could positively impact your business growth.
mondlyWorks
In today’s globalized business economy, your employees could be negotiating with manufacturers in China, meeting with their satellite office colleagues in Panama or discussing a proposal with clients in France. The biggest challenge to the global marketplace is the language barrier, and that’s where mondlyWORKS steps in to help.
mondlyWORKS is a cloud-based app that allows managers to create an engaging language learning environment in the workplace. For employees, it provides a fun, gamified experience on their mobile devices, which enables them to learn almost anywhere. For businesses, it provides a dashboard where managers can see the overall language learning performance of all their employees.
Speaking the language of your foreign employees, clients or customers, even at a basic level, can have a huge impact on staff camaraderie, business relationships, and customer satisfaction.
By improving your employees’ language skills, they’ll be able to communicate better with other employees – both locally and internationally – leading to higher collaboration and productivity. Also, you won’t have to limit yourself and you’ll be able to hire more candidates based on their talent and abilities, even if they don’t yet speak a specific language.
Bloomfire
Chances are, much of the information you want your staff to learn is already within your office walls. If employees simply had better ability and access to share and learn from each other’s work, your organization would run much smoother. Bloomfire is the learning tool that’s helping workplaces to do just that. With Bloomfire, you can keep all your organizational content – articles, documents, videos, etc. – in one easy-accessible, searchable place. Employees can upload files directly from their computers or from storage tools like Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. Best of all, Bloomfire automatically indexes and tags uploaded content, so users can search for words and phrases in documents or even those spoken in videos.
Chances are, much of the information you want your staff to learn is already within your office walls. If employees simply had better ability and access to share and learn from each other’s work, your organization would run much smoother. Bloomfire is the learning tool that’s helping workplaces to do just that.
With Bloomfire, you can keep all your organizational content – articles, documents, videos, etc. – in one easy-accessible, searchable place. Employees can upload files directly from their computers or from storage tools like Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. Best of all, Bloomfire automatically indexes and tags uploaded content, so users can search for words and phrases in documents or even those spoken in videos.
For businesses with large, departmental teams, this can be a huge game changer. Employees can now access all guidelines, “how-to” inhouse articles, policies, procedures and recommended fixes on their own. The ability to access information from other departments on-the-go enables employees to open up their minds, and learn bits of knowledge that broaden their horizons beyond what their job role demands.
This knowledge-sharing pool can also make up a lot of time for departments like Human Resources and Information Technology, enabling them to focus on business development, and not just supporting and troubleshooting staff concerns.
Big Think Edge
If you want your employees to learn from big thinkers and industry leaders, you’re probably doing one of two things – sending them to an expensive conference or bringing an expert in for a workshop, which probably costs even more. What if you could get that knowledge to your employees without taking them away from work for multiple days at a time, and without that hefty price tag?
Big Think Edge enables your employees to develop their knowledge and skills with eLearning courses done by some of the biggest influencers and experts in a variety of industries. They currently have over 1,000 short-form, actionable video lessons from well-known names like Barbara Corcoran, Richard Branson, Bill Nye, Malcolm Gladwell, and more.
Oculus for Business
The immersive, stimulating nature of virtual reality (VR) technology makes it the perfect tool for businesses that typically require on-the-job training, particularly in highly-technical or risky environments. Everyone from engineers, firefighters and surgeons to companies like KFC, UPS and Walmart have been using VR to train employees.
Virtual reality technology, the collective term for virtual, augmented and mixed reality, mimics real-life situations, allowing users to donning the signature VR headsets to practice their responses to stimuli in a controlled, simulated environment. Studies have shown that employees find such training much more stimulating and enjoyable, leading to improved retention of material amongst people with varied learning styles.
Of the companies that offer VR technology, Oculus has stood out by targeting businesses directly, showcasing their ability to help increase productivity, reduce training costs and enhance collaboration.
While the costs to develop unique full-scale virtual reality training may be prohibitive for most small businesses, many software developers like 360immersive are already creating industry-wide VR apps and with a low-cost 360-degree camera, you can start creating your own.
Moreover, the VR features in mondlyWORKS’ app work with Oculus as well. So if you want to give your employees the awesome experience of learning languages with VR technology, this one’s a no brainer.
The Possibilities are Endless
These are just a few examples of specific learning technologies that can have a huge impact on your business, but the list doesn’t end here.
The truth is, there are many software solutions and tools out there that have business learning applications, even if they were not built specifically for this purpose. Trello, known for its project-management capabilities, is now widely used for staff onboarding and creating knowledgebases. YouTube, known for its amazing ability to make you lose half a day without realizing it, is now being used by organizations as a video-based training manual for staff and clients alike.
It is up to you to examine what your organization’s needs are, and what devices and tools your employees are already using, to create the most seamless learning experience possible so that they will actually be interested and enthusiastic about improving their own knowledge, developing the company in the process.