How an Online Learning Platform Helps Effectively Upskill Your Teams
Written by: Phillip Carmichael
Table of Contents
Organizational skills needs are evolving rapidly as remote and hybrid work become the norm and continuous technological advances permeate the global business ecosystem. Companies are faced with the ongoing challenge of reskilling and upskilling a geographically dispersed workforce to remain competitive and meet their business objectives.
How can organizations effectively upskill their teams to meet current and future skills needs? Utilizing an online learning platform is a convenient and effective way that organizations can upskill their teams for the present and future of work.
What is an Online Learning Platform?
An online learning platform (or system) is primarily an experience platform, which places focus on the end user (the learner) and their needs. Online learning platforms or systems are web-based software platforms that provide eLearning content through instructionally designed videos, interactive modules, supplemental quizzes and assessments, and other means. The learner’s experience is streamlined and seamless, with complete courses broken down into brief microlessons that engage and inform.
Why You Should Invest in an Employee Learning Platform
Why should you use online courses to upskill your workforce? There are dozens of notable reasons that employee learning platforms are becoming the norm across every industry. Taking advantage of them yourself can help you and your staff:
Enhance employee skills: Continuous learning is essential if you want your employees to keep growing with your brand. An employee learning platform allows them to continue mastering existing skills and develop new ones to help them in the workplace and beyond.
Adapt to industry changes: The modern world moves quickly, and if you want to keep up, your staff must be ready to oblige. You can add new online courses to a learning platform that helps your people stay up to date on the latest industry advancements.
Save money on teaching opportunities: Inviting one-time speakers for a seminar or conference becomes expensive very quickly, and it is not a long-term solution for continuous advancement. Employee learning platforms give your staff opportunities to learn at any time, as often as they'd like.
Monitor development and growth: Most online learning systems offer a way for leadership to monitor their students or staff and keep track of what they learn. This might help you develop quantifiable goals, through which you can reward your staff and boost morale.
Enhance staff confidence and productivity: The more informed your staff is, the more confident they are likely to feel in their role and the more productive they can be with the tools they have.
Increase ROI: Increased productivity means your employees can get more done, faster. This is great news for your bottom line, as it's likely to increase your return on investment (ROI).
A Global Digital Skills Gap: The Facts
The global digital skills gap is an unfortunate reality that threatens business productivity and growth around the world. Digital skills continue to grow increasingly necessary for the future of work, yet many workers don’t possess these skills.
87% of companies worldwide are aware they either have a skills gap or anticipate having one within a few years.
85% of American workers cited digital skills as either “extremely important” or “very important” for success in today’s workplace.
3 in 4 workers today don’t have the digital skills needed by organizations.
Only 28% of businesses actively participate in training programs to address these needs.
Not only is there a very clear need for upskilling when it comes to digital skills, but there’s also a persistent soft skills gap that organizations need to address in order to optimize performance.
An Often-Overlooked Skills Gap: Soft Skills
Soft skills generally refer to non-technical and communication-focused skills, with Indeed defining them as “interpersonal and behavioral skills that help you work well with other people and develop your career.” Soft skills are extremely important to businesses, yet many workers don’t have the soft skills companies need:
Leading soft skills are requested four times more than leading hard skills in employer job postings.
92% of almost 900 executives surveyed said soft skills were just as important, or even more important, than technical skills.
89% of these executives said they experience a “very or somewhat difficult” time finding employees with these soft skills.
Almost 75% of employers say they have a hard time finding candidates with the soft skills their companies need.
With both a digital skills gap and a soft skills gap threatening business performance, productivity, and growth, organizations can provide their employees access to an online learning platform to address and bridge these gaps.
The Benefits of Online Learning and Learning Platforms
Recent years have made significant advances in the fields of online learning and the learning platforms that facilitate them. Today, almost every working adult or child in school has experienced online learning at some point, and many organizations still find online learning useful for everyday learning. It provides several benefits, such as:
The ability to standardize or customize lessons as needed: Everyone learns differently, and learning platforms make it easier to integrate various forms of media into a lesson plan, allowing everyone to internalize information in a way that makes sense for them.
Easier accessibility through mobile learning: When learning online, users can access information from anywhere, whether in a computer lab or on the go with their mobile phones.
Integration with third-party tools: Most online learning platforms seamlessly integrate with a number of third-party programs and software.
How Can Our Learning Platform Help?
Our newly designed learning platform helps you upskill your team by providing access to our award-winning library of thousands of training videos focused on both digital and power skills. These skills training videos include brief microlessons covering the most popular and widely used business software, including M365, Google Workspace, and Adobe Creative Cloud, among others. In addition, our platform offers expert courses that teach in-demand power skills, featuring comprehensive eLearning content centered on professional etiquette, communication, work-life balance, health and wellness, and more.
In today’s ever-evolving digital environment, software is updated constantly, and as a result, Intellezy systematically refreshes the eLearning content on our platform to remain current with the latest software updates. Nearly all our training videos are available in 20 languages through closed captions, and our instructors remain on-screen during the entire lesson to engage learners through a face-to-face learning experience. Full video transcripts are available in these 20 languages, and users can take notes within the platform, bookmark lessons, take assessments, view course progress, and more.
Our system is easy for both end users and administrators to navigate. Platform administrators can create course campaigns by assigning specific lessons and courses to learners, ensuring that employees are training on exactly what they need to know to excel in their roles and bring value to the organization. In addition, administrators can access a variety of insightful data that can help them optimize their learning and development strategy, including number of active users, number of video views by timeframe (weekly, monthly, yearly), quiz and supplemental assessment performance, and most popular lessons and courses.
Finally, our platform enables companies to deliver their own eLearning content through the platform and offers selective white-labeling to reflect your branding. Intellezy also provides custom eLearning development services, partnering with your company to develop and deliver personalized eLearning content that teaches your employees the specific skills and knowledge they need.
Discover Our Skill-Building Platform for Employee Training
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