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Staff development is critical in today's competitive business environment not only to keep ahead of competitors, but to keep great employees within your business and develop them as your most valuable resource. Well-trained staff will not only perform better, but also drive innovation and cement a positive culture in the workplace.

While traditional in-person training has been the norm for many types of businesses, the advent of digital technology has introduced online training as a compelling alternative. Here we discuss the advantages of online training over traditional methods, with a few real-world examples from businesses that have successfully implemented these strategies.

Flexibility and Accessibility

Traditional Training Limitations:
Conventional training methods often necessitate employees to attend sessions at specific times and locations, potentially disrupting daily operations and limiting participation. Whether team members are working shifts at an airport, or are in a call centre during peak call times, it can be difficult getting groups of people to all take training time out from work at the same time. For smaller businesses it can simply be a matter that staff have to be available for customers. Furthermore there can also be issues if team-members are in disparate locations and have to travel to a central training venue.

Advantages of Online Training:
Anytime, Anywhere Learning: Online training enables employees to access materials from any location at any time, accommodating varying schedules and time zones. This can be a huge benefit for allowing flexible training with less disruption.
Self-Paced Progression: Employees can learn at their own pace, dedicating more time to challenging topics and moving swiftly through familiar ones. There is also a benefit for some team members who might feel self-conscious about their education or learning challenges and prefer to work at their own pace in privacy not next to colleagues.

Booking.com a leading online accommodations platform, recognized the importance of eLearning early on. They implemented a custom-made solution for their employees, including online classes and tutoring. This approach allowed employees, regardless of their technical background, to enhance their skills at their convenience, such as while in transit or even at the gym. This lead to professional growth and improved performance within the company.

Cost-Effectiveness

Traditional Training Costs:
In-person training often incurs expenses related to venue rentals, travel, printed materials, and instructor fees. Whilst corporates might have decent training budgets, for many smaller businesses and owner-operators, it is not realistic to pay for a specialist to run them through a training programme.

Advantages of Online Training:
Reduced Overheads: Online training eliminates the need for physical spaces and travel, which in turn significantly lowers costs. When you spend less on the overheads of training you have more budget to spend on the training itself and getting quality learning for your team.
Scalability: Once developed, online courses can be distributed to an unlimited number of employees without substantial additional expenses. With MySafetyTV online workplace training modules you can have an all access monthly subscription or choose the modules that you need.

IBM transitioned to e-learning for management training, resulting in substantial cost savings. The company reduced expenses associated with travel and venue rentals while delivering consistent training content globally.

Consistency and Standardization

Traditional Training Variability:
Different instructors may deliver content inconsistently, leading to variations in employee knowledge. It can be as simple as different presenters having different accents, speaking at different speeds, or certain styles that can range from concise but impersonal, to presenters who like to ramble and share personal anecdotes.

Advantages of Online Training:
Uniform Content Delivery: Ensures all employees receive the same information, maintaining consistency across the organization. Furthermore, with quality online training courses the trainees can return and go over material more than once if they need to.
Easily Updatable Materials: Allows for quick updates to training content, ensuring information remains current and relevant. This is critical for topics such as safety in the workplace where compliance is critical and rules can change.

Siemens, a global technology powerhouse, embarked on a digital learning transformation to standardize training across its diverse workforce. By implementing a centralized online training platform, Siemens ensured consistent delivery of content, which was easily updated to reflect the latest industry standards and practices.

Enhanced Engagement and Interactivity

Traditional Training Challenges:
In-person lectures can be passive, leading to reduced engagement and retention. For some employees who might have left school at a young age, the thought of having to go back to sitting listening to a 'teacher' at the front of a 'class' can be an immediate turn-off and in some cases might even raise anxiety levels.

Advantages of Online Training:
Interactive Elements: Incorporates quizzes, simulations, and multimedia to engage learners actively. This interactive approach in bite sized units is more in tune with how many people relax on their phones and other devices.
Gamification: Utilizes game-like elements such as badges and leaderboards to motivate participants. This style is common with most social media applications and learning apps such as Duolingo, and this familiarity will help staff commit to training and stick with it, instead of being bored or intimidated.

Laing O'Rourke, a leading construction company in Australia, revamped its staff training by adopting "bite-sized" learning modules inspired by platforms like Instagram and TikTok. This modern approach improved knowledge retention and engagement among its 5,500 employees.

Real-Time Tracking and Analytics

Assessing the effectiveness of in-person training can be challenging due to limited data collection and leaving a lot to the individual judgement of trainers. There can also be delays from when courses are completed and when results or insights are collated and reported on.

Advantages of Online Training:
Progress Monitoring: Allows managers to track employee progress and identify areas needing improvement.
Data-Driven Decisions: Provides insights into course effectiveness, enabling continuous improvement.

Personalization and Adaptive Learning

One-size-fits-all sessions may not address individual learning needs or preferences for a diverse modern workforce. Depending on the topics and level of detail and skill required, there can be adjustments needed for individual training.

Advantages of Online Training:
Customized Learning Paths: Tailors content to individual roles, skills, and career goals. Having a custom learning plan can remove irrelevant content and increase the chances that individuals will stick at it.
Adaptive Technologies: Adjusts difficulty and content based on learner performance, optimizing the learning experience. Similar to the Laing O'Rourke example earlier, copying models from other apps that modify activities to the individual learner means they are studying at an appropriate level for their own abilities.

Google's Project Oxygen emphasized the importance of soft skills development among its leaders. By leveraging data analytics, Google tailored training programs to individual needs, enhancing managerial effectiveness across the organization.

Environmental Sustainability

Most businesses are looking at ways to be more sustainable and training is one area where quick-wins can be made fairly easily. In-person training often involves travel and printed materials which all contribute to carbon emissions and waste. Travel by car or plane is a financial cost as well as an environmental one, while having bins full of handouts at the end of a training workshop, or attendees taking home bulky ring-binders to eventually be thrown out in house-hold rubbish is not an ideal outcome.

Advantages of Online Training:
Reduced Carbon Footprint: Minimizes the need for travel, lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
Paperless Materials: Utilizes digital resources, reducing paper consumption and the resulting waste management.

Programmed New Zealand is a Kiwi company that reduced its carbon footprint by switching to digital training, and achieved a Toitū Envirocare Carbon Reduce Certification.

Whether you're a senior manager in a multi-national company, or a small business owner in New Zealand or Australia, online training simply makes better sense for many types of workplace learning. There are of course situations where nothing can replace a skilled educator training staff in complex topics or skills, but a lot of training can run effectively online to gain the benefits discussed above. If you are interested in more detailed examples of online training in the workplace this is a good article listing 17 companies with great staff training programmes and most incorporate online and digital components.