The two greatest challenges facing corporate Learning functions in 2023, Brandon Hall Group research shows, are upskilling employees at the speed of business and the inability to measure it effectively.

Unfortunately, the two go hand-in-hand. How do you know if you are developing skills to make your workforce future-ready if you can’t prove workers can apply new skills on the job?

That’s why Schoox, a Brandon Hall Group Smartchoice® Preferred Provider, has solutions specifically designed to upskill and reskill employees and measure the results. Schoox can help improve the business impact of employers’ skills development. That’s important because only 10% of organizations believe their Learning function supports demonstration of skill proficiency to a high or very high extent, our research shows.

The benefits of effectively developing new skills — both for new hires and current employees — go far beyond improving their performance and preparing them for new challenges. Skill development attacks two other critical challenges that people function wrestle with: talent retention and engagement.

By making your workforce future-ready, you improve the odds your talent will stick around long enough for you to reap the benefits of having improved their skills. Here are just a few examples of the impact:

• Sense of belonging. When employees can improve their skills and their career opportunities, trust and appreciation for the employer — beyond the paycheck — increases. Your talent is more likely to stay, which makes it easier for you to build a pipeline of skilled workers.
• Job satisfaction. When employees feel supported in enhancing their skills, they’re more engaged and satisfied with their jobs. This leads to higher levels of commitment and discretionary effort, which often leads to greater loyalty, which leads to lower turnover.
• Increased employee productivity and innovation. Skill development improves your employees’ ability to perform effectively and efficiently. Skilled workers are often more confident, innovative and adaptable, enabling them to tackle complex challenges.

• Sense of belonging. When employees can improve their skills and their career opportunities, trust and appreciation for the employer — beyond the paycheck — increases. Your talent is more likely to stay, which makes it easier for you to build a pipeline of skilled workers.
• Job satisfaction. When employees feel supported in enhancing their skills, they’re more engaged and satisfied with their jobs. This leads to higher levels of commitment and discretionary effort, which often leads to greater loyalty, which leads to lower turnover.
• Increased employee productivity and innovation. Skill development improves your employees’ ability to perform effectively and efficiently. Skilled workers are often more confident, innovative and adaptable, enabling them to tackle complex challenges.

• Sense of belonging. When employees can improve their skills and their career opportunities, trust and appreciation for the employer — beyond the paycheck — increases. Your talent is more likely to stay, which makes it easier for you to build a pipeline of skilled workers.
• Job satisfaction. When employees feel supported in enhancing their skills, they’re more engaged and satisfied with their jobs. This leads to higher levels of commitment and discretionary effort, which often leads to greater loyalty, which leads to lower turnover.
• Increased employee productivity and innovation. Skill development improves your employees’ ability to perform effectively and efficiently. Skilled workers are often more confident, innovative and adaptable, enabling them to tackle complex challenges.

• Sense of belonging. When employees can improve their skills and their career opportunities, trust and appreciation for the employer — beyond the paycheck — increases. Your talent is more likely to stay, which makes it easier for you to build a pipeline of skilled workers.
• Job satisfaction. When employees feel supported in enhancing their skills, they’re more engaged and satisfied with their jobs. This leads to higher levels of commitment and discretionary effort, which often leads to greater loyalty, which leads to lower turnover.
• Increased employee productivity and innovation. Skill development improves your employees’ ability to perform effectively and efficiently. Skilled workers are often more confident, innovative and adaptable, enabling them to tackle complex challenges.
• Talent attraction. Organizations that prioritize skill development — and can prove their commitment and success — are more likely to attract the best talent.
• Employee agility. Industries are constantly evolving, driven by technological advancements, market shifts and changing customer preferences. Effective skill development programs help your talent stay current with trends and improve capabilities in alignment with emerging demands.
• Succession planning. As experienced employees retire or move on, you can increase the chances for a smooth transition in key roles by having employees prepared for higher-level roles. Most organizations struggle with their talent pipeline and succession planning — which has gained importance in the wake of The Great Resignation — helps maintain business continuity and minimizes the disruption caused by talent gaps.

Discover how Schoox brings learning and development together.

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Why Provide Employees On-the-Job Training?

On-the-job training (OJT) is an essential part of learning and development for many businesses. Let’s look at some reasons why it’s so important.

Optimize Frontline Workforce Performance

A common adage in the business world is that your customer is always right. Optimizing frontline workforce performance can help your business improve customer service and ultimately improve your bottom line.

Whether it’s a restaurant, hotel, retailer, or other consumer-facing business, unfavorable customer feedback usually means your employees aren’t performing well on the frontlines. While isolated incidents of poor customer service might be part of the issue, a general pattern of bad reviews indicates a larger systemic failure on the part of the business—not its employees. These kinds of problems can often be traced to inadequate training.

OJT helps businesses ensure their frontline workforces master the skills critical to success—at both an individual and organizational level. It enables learning and development (L&D) professionals to connect specific skill sets to key business activities and goals, allowing them to design training programs that teach their employees the skills required to truly excel at their jobs. This might mean showing hotel housekeeping staff how to fold towels or prepare rooms in a particular way and observing each employee to confirm knowledge retention, or discreetly observing employees on the sales floor after training to gauge how they interact with customers.

Hands-On Experience

Failure is good for learning. OJT gives employees the opportunity to learn, correct mistakes and enhance skills in a pressure-free environment, providing them with much needed practice before they hit the frontlines or go out in the field. Even for non-customer facing jobs, OJT allows employees to hone their skills before they’re put to the test. Physically performing job tasks also helps employees feel more connected to their work.

Ensure Knowledge Retention

Training is only effective if managers can ensure their staff can perform the jobs that need to be done. OJT is one of the best ways for training managers to confirm their employees learned the tasks and skills covered in training. By observing their performance, training managers can determine whether employees are ready for the frontlines or need more help before taking on the job. They can then provide the necessary additional training to help employees strengthen any weak spots and feel confident in their ability to complete critical tasks. With mobile accessibility, training managers can even quietly monitor employee performance where it matters most—in front of customers.

The Schoox Difference

Businesses often rely on paper scorecards and manual methods to track OJT training compliance, but this method is cumbersome to maintain, makes it difficult to share data with other systems and to report on at scale. Other training tools often focus on simple forms and observation checklists that may not provide enough flexibility to design training in a way that’s efficient and ideal for a digital workplace. Schoox goes above and beyond observation checklists to encourage effective learning via on-the-job training. Schoox offers training managers and L&D professionals the option to create course-connected OJT tasks, which are part of a larger course or curriculum, or standalone OJT tasks that are independent from any other ongoing training programs.

As an example, a course or curriculum-connected OJT task could be used to observe employees prepare different foods after they watch digital content teaching them about each menu item.

A standalone OJT task might be used to observe an employee prepare a new menu item that wasn’t covered in the original course. They can be used to provide supplemental or ad-hoc training whenever required.

Once learners have completed their assigned OJT tasks, training managers can access an at-a-glance view of progress across the board. Training managers can use this information to determine who on their team is excelling, who needs more support, and what kind of additional supervision might be needed for particular team members.

What’s New?

We recently made several enhancements to OJT functionality within Schoox. Admins and training managers may now elect to re-use previously created standalone OJT tasks as part of a course or curriculum. In the example above, this means the training managers would be able to pull the standalone OJT task created for a new menu item into the existing course or curriculum.

We also added a new homepage widget that allows trainees to quickly sign off on OJT tasks, providing a better user experience. Finally, we added a new report for both standalone and course-connected OJT tasks that displays learner progress for each. This provides L&D professionals with critical insight into how employees are performing, which can be applied to improve the design of future OJT tasks.

On-the-job training is the best way for many employers to teach and assess mission-critical skills. It helps employees build the confidence they need to be successful in their roles. When done right, it translates into greater operational efficiency, exceptional customer service, repeat customers, and increased revenues for businesses.

Chat with one of our Solution Consultants to learn more about the many flexible options to create OJT initiatives in Schoox.

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Blended learning approaches have proliferated the corporate training space since the mid 90s, and mobile technology added to the boom throughout the 2000s.  

The COVID-19 pandemic is now fueling another boom in blended learning. As non-essential businesses pivot toward remote work—as well as entire sectors of those considered essential—L&D teams have to get creative to onboard and train their employees. This trend is projected to continue as more businesses permanently shift toward partially or fully remote operations.   

Video Learning: The Benefits

While few can argue the benefits of in-person instruction, it doesn’t make sense for every organization—especially those with distributed operations across multiple locations or large remote workforces. 

In contrast to in-person training, video learning is more accessible, cost effective, and scalable.

Accessible: With video learning, companies can ensure all employees have access to the same information, even across distinct brands or distant geographies. 

Digitally Native: Video training also tends to be preferred by younger employees and is quickly becoming the go-to training method for companies with geographically dispersed workforces.  

Digestible: Learning is most effective in short, bite-sized chunks known as “microlearning.” Video learning enables L&D professionals to take a “YouTube-like approach” to training that is especially popular among younger employees.  

Measurable: Schoox captures valuable data and analytics about video learning that can be leveraged to inform and improve overall L&D strategy. 

Schoox Introduces Video Exams

For training to be effective, L&D professionals must be able to measure skills retention among employees, and employees must be able to perform those skills in real-time when on the job. The asynchronous nature of video training, however, makes it difficult to assess whether employees are really retaining the information provided; without a way to test employees for knowledge retention, business leaders have no way to determine whether training is effective. 

With Schoox, L&D professionals can not only curate video training into valuable courses and curricula, but also standardize skills measurement and build dynamic assessments with our new feature—customizable video exams. 

Video exams enable training managers to insert questions in multiple formats to assess employee retention at various checkpoints anywhere throughout the video. These exams can be created with any video in the content library. Questions can either be added manually or sourced from existing question pools to make the process even faster and easier to replicate. 

Available question types include:

• Multiple Choice
• Matching
• Multiple Answers
• Fill in the Blank
• True or False

Schoox makes it easy for training managers to create customized video assessments without the need to use additional course creation software. This is especially useful for small teams looking to streamline training as much as possible without compromising on learning effectiveness.  

Why Use Video Exams? 

Video exams are a powerful way for businesses of all kinds to measure skills and knowledge retention among employees. Here are some common uses:  

Knowledge Checkpoints 

Create video exams to test employees on a one-time or recurring basis. A bar with a rotating seasonal drink menu, for example, can use the video exam feature to introduce and test employees on new menu items. Video exams can help test new hires on how well they understand core values or important business processes. 

Compliance

Video exams make it easier to deliver required local, state, federal, and industry-specific compliance training. They’re also a more engaging way for employees to learn this critical information. 

Scenario-Based Assessments 

Video exams are a good way to test employees for skills retention on specific tasks or information—how to repair a certain item, for example. Video exams can be particularly useful for new hire orientations and employee onboarding. 

Reporting 

Video exams provide leaders with data that can be leveraged to inform L&D strategy and planning. Users with reporting permissions can create reports that indicate how many employees completed a particular exam, their scores, number of attempts, and more.  

Custom-curated video exams are the perfect way for all kinds of businesses to disseminate highly specific knowledge sets to the right sectors of their workforce at scale. With access to the right information, employees can perform their jobs better and take greater ownership of their learning journey. For L&D professionals, video exams are an ideal way to deliver training, measure skills and knowledge retention, and derive actionable insights from results. 

See video exams and other Schoox features in action—schedule a demo with us.

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As employees reenter the workplace, they will likely seek a sense of stability and direction. This should be communicated from the top down, with demonstrated buy-in from executive leaders. They will also look to their managers to equip them with the right skills to manage immediate and future changes.

During this time, it is important for employees to have a sense of control over their ability to succeed. In the short term, one of the best, most direct ways to address that is through learning. You can provide employees with opportunities to improve their skills and competencies. Sustaining this in the long term requires a broader change. You will need to prepare your workforce to adopt an agile learning culture.

Why Skills and Competencies Matter Right Now

I’m sure you’ve heard the terms “reskilling and upskilling” flying around in the L&D world. They are important words during this time. But what do they mean for your organization specifically?

Reskilling means learning new skills so you can do a different job, or training people to do a different job. It involves finding people with skills that align with the new skills your organization requires. Upskilling means learning new skills or teaching workers new, advanced skills to close knowledge gaps while involving them in ongoing learning to help them advance in their career.

Developing skills and competencies is becoming increasingly important in the U.S. and across the globe. For example:

• In the report, Learning and Skills at Work 2020, released in June by CIPD and Accenture, 36% of respondents listed “addressing skills gaps” as their No. 1 priority for their organization.
•  Of the top 10 threats to organizations’ future growth, “availability of key skills” ranked number three in PwC’s 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey in 2019.
• MIT Sloan’s assessment of a yearlong in-factory training program on communication, problem-solving, decision-making, and stress management found that the training resulted in a 250% ROI within eight months after it ended.

Planning for Reentry: Focus on Skills

The case is clear. Businesses should be focusing heavily on closing skills and competency gaps as they plan to reopen their doors. They can begin by building a competency framework. Using a skills and competencies template to guide you through this process saves a lot of time and effort. The goal is to identify the skills and competencies your workforce has, the ones they need, and where to fill the gaps with learning.

I recommend leaning on skills and competencies. It will help your workforce become flexible amid change—and remain that way—so they are prepared to pivot if and when another crisis happens. Skills that can facilitate short-term change while preparing your workforce for long-term agility include:

• Flexibility—Being willing to “meet others halfway” when working in an atmosphere of frequent operational and procedural changes
• Adaptability—Being able to change based on what happens around you, whether that involves customers needs, changing technology, or a rapidly changing workplace environment
• Communication—Being able to quickly, accurately, and effectively communicate changes in strategy or approach amid several changing factors
• De-escalation—Being able to “dial down” one’s own anger and the anger of others in times of confusion, change, or stress

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Good interpersonal skills allow you to network effortlessly and effectively. They also serve as an essential foundation for teamwork. In order to be an efficient team member, it is essential that you communicate with the other team members clearly and effectively.

Interpersonal Communication

There are two types of communication; one-way and two-way. In one-way communication, the information flows from the sender to the receiver and in two-way, information flows both ways.

The process for interpersonal communication is simple. Information, which includes both verbal and non verbal messages, flows from the sender to the receiver via a medium. The receiver of the information then provides feedback to the sender.

Interpersonal communication can be broken down into different components, which are

1. The Communicators: There need to be at least two people involved for any communication. The communicators can act as senders and receivers simultaneously.
2. The Message: The message includes both verbal information and non verbal gestures
3. Medium: The physical means that transfer the message from sender to receiver. E.g. in face-to-face communication, speech and vision serve as a medium
4. Noise: It is anything that distorts the message. It can be in the form of physical noise or any other factors such as ambiguous words or disinterest that may distort the understanding of the message
5. Feedback: The messages that the receiver returns, which tells the sender about how well the message was comprehended.

Team Building

A team is a group of individuals that are working together towards a common cause. For example, an HR director along with his managers is the HR team for an organization. Teams must be developed between individuals that have skills that complement each other. Some weak employees can also be teamed up with the high performers to promote employee development

The purpose of team building is to achieve a task that would be difficult or impossible for a single individual to perform in the given conditions. Team members need to be clear on the purpose the team is willing to achieve.

It is also essential that the team members must also be able to communicate clearly and effectively with other team members. This will help in avoiding conflict amongst the tasks performed and the roles assigned.

If you have the skills required for effective team building and teamwork, you can achieve a lot more than what you would achieve working by yourself. You will see the stress level go down and when accustomed to teamwork, will enjoy work more.

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Importance of Personal Skills in Business

Personal skills serve to be very crucial for the success of business. Several business skills are derived from personal ones and it is often, that the two work side by side.

Communication

Out of the many skills, one of the very important ones is the ability to communicate with others. It is often misunderstood that everyone possesses this skill and is usually good at it. However, effective communication is not as easy as it sounds. For an individual to obtain the desired outcomes, it is essential that the information be communicated in such a way that is clear, to the point and easy to understand. If the information is not transferred clearly, it is very possible that the results will not meet the expectations.

Time Management

Time management is another skill that will definitely cross over to business and will become only more vital. The better you are at managing your time, the more effective you will be as an employee or a manager.

Goal Setting

Goal setting is another skill that is used at both professional and personal levels. If you are able to set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time bound) goals and work hard to achieve them, this will probably cross over and greatly boost your professional performance.

Sources of Personal Skill Development

Personal Development starts from within. With the flood of information these days, it is not difficult to find tips and strategies for honing your personal skills. There are several approaches to learn and polish these skills. You may

• Find a training organization offering personal development workshops and courses near you.
• Enroll for a professional online training course.
• Look for and read through books on personal development.
• Incorporate eLearning and visit websites that are information rich enabling you to download eBooks, videos and other materials to help sharpen your skills

Benefits of Personal Skill Development

Personal Skills will help you throughout your life, both on professional and personal level. With improving your personal skills, you will

• Become more organized and will find yourself in a pressure situation less often
• Communicate better, whether it is verbal or written communication
• Lower down your stress levels and learn to manage the stress that arises
• Learn to manage anger, rage and anxiety
• Lead a healthier lifestyle

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