Maintenance learning: Challenges, solutions and expert advice
When a company is constantly developing and scaling up, it regularly has to deal with changing work processes, rules and regulations. For a business to function effectively, it is important that employees adapt quickly and efficiently to innovations and have the necessary knowledge. Keeping corporate knowledge up to date is helped by the introduction of continuous (maintenance) training.
Why maintenance learning is important, how to support it effectively and what its benefits are, we and the corporate e-learning experts tell you in this material.
Challenges and solutions for maintenance learning
1. Increasing employee productivity
Maintenance training helps to keep employees’ existing knowledge up to date and provide new knowledge as needed. It improves employee productivity, skills, and qualifications.
Advice from LMS Collaborator: Knowledge base.
For training to be effective, you need to continually supplement and update the background information requested by your staff. This will help to maintain their knowledge. If they forget something, they can refer to the Knowledge Base for help at any time and find the answers they need.
In LMS Collaborator, all material uploaded to the portal automatically enters the knowledge base. These can be different types of resources: links, pdf files, word, excel, epub documents published in the news portal, topics and Wiki pages. Materials can be structured into different categories and access levels can be set up – access can be restricted to employees of different positions and departments.
Try out all the advantages of the LMS Collaborator knowledge base in practice.
2. Maintaining continuous learning and mentoring
Maintenance learning offers an approach based on the continuous acquisition of new knowledge by employees. Regular online training sessions or courses help to improve skills and continuously develop. Employees can learn from more experienced colleagues and practice what they have learned by teaching others. This helps to create an effective and continuous learning cycle.
Advice from LMS Collaborator: Microlearning.
To maintain continuous learning, it is important to update knowledge on a regular basis. Give content to employees in small portions-use a microlearning approach. If a company has regular changes in business processes that need to be adjusted quickly, this material is much easier to update than extensive training programs.
3. Fast employee adaptation to changes
Very often companies are faced with the need to change and adapt to changing conditions: sociological, market, technological, etc. Some work processes are replaced by others that require rapid adaptation of the team and instant assimilation of the necessary skills and knowledge. Thanks to the continuity of maintenance training, employees are constantly acquiring the up-to-date knowledge they need to do their jobs well.
Advice from LMS Collaborator: Communication tools.
To ensure that your employees are the first to know about important changes in their work or training, keep them in constant communication. LMS Collaborator tools – news, notifications, automatic email newsletters, and a forum – will help. Also do not forget to keep the knowledge up-to-date. Use the Knowledge Base to organize knowledge support on-demand – regularly monitor its content and update it as new knowledge becomes available.
4. Knowledge sharing
Maintenance learning helps to organize the exchange of knowledge in the process of work, maintains an atmosphere of openness between employees, trainers and managers. Creation of professional communities in the company unites employees with common interests and views, creates a favorable environment for development and exchange of experience. Regular trainings with experts, opinion leaders form a positive impression on employees and motivate them to develop.
Advice from LMS Collaborator: Feedback.
It is important to provide feedback to employees after each training or seminar. Small surveys in which employees can share their opinions and leave wishes for the next training and content selection will help.
El`Lab Mentors about Maintenance Learning
Andrew Kubay – e-learning Software Engineer at SweetRush Inc
Maintenance training is a rather complicated thing, in order for it to function properly, you need to analyze the initial results. For example, if we give the same test every month, after a while it will cease to be effective. So you have to change it, adapt it. These tests will be different for each role in the company. With adaptive training, you can ease the work of employees, because we have topics and knowledge which the user must constantly update. And with such a test, you can understand whether he needs to assign a course or testing or not.
In general, maintenance learning is a dynamic structure. It is constantly changing, so it needs to be updated regularly. Even the checks that we assign to the user must be constantly changed and supplemented. It is a constantly living structure.
Yevhen Shtemenko – head of Comfy corporate university
Maintenance learning manifests itself in learning new information on a regular basis and maintaining the level of knowledge you already have. The second option is other businesses where there is no new information and you only need to keep up the information you already have.
The standard metric to monitor the effectiveness of maintenance learning is the number of people who take the training. What matters is the result of the test they take at the end of the training. The number of points or percentages shows how well they learned the theory. This is a very important metric because it allows you to further understand the effectiveness of the content in relation to the score. If a large number of people take the test, but the sales result is unsatisfactory, surely the content is not very effective.
Maintainance learning is always clear and applicable to a person’s specific activity. And if the content is clear and effective, then we get the right result.
Valerii Zadavysvichka – distance learning expert at the National Bank of Ukraine
Any training begins with some kind of a need. First of all, it is necessary to answer the question: why we need it, how to do it, and what will be the output. As I see it, maintenance learning can be implemented through short e-mail newsletters, interesting articles or peer-to-peer learning (when people learn from each other).
To get a source of information for maintenance learning, you can identify ambassadors who can keep track of trends and tendencies. The company’s employees attend a lot of professional events, for example, I went to El`Lab as a mentor. I learned a lot for myself, talked to other mentors, saw how other companies work, teams told about their experiences, I immersed myself in a certain environment. You dive into details, and you learn information from a different angle. Other events, resources online, colleagues can follow that source. It’s a difficult tool from a learning perspective, but you have to set a certain rhythm here. It’s like a snow globe, if you get it going and spin it well, then it will live on its own.
Conclusion
- To ensure the effectiveness of maintenance learning, regularly monitor the update of the Knowledge Base and update the content as new knowledge is gained.
- Provide content to employees in small portions – use the microlearning approach (material is easier to update than large training programs).
- To keep employees up to date, maintain communication. It is convenient to use automatic e-mail messages for important notifications and alerts, news and announcements for marketing of corporate events, and chat-bots for online information.
- Give a call after every training session. This can be helped by small notes or checklists.
Want to keep your employees’ knowledge up to date, increase their productivity and adapt to changes quickly?
Submit your application and we will show you how it can be done on the basis of LMS Collaborator.
