The workforce is changing. More and more young adults are graduating college with degrees in the humanities, while older workers are retiring and moving into management roles. This shift means that companies beyond just technology need to be prepared for a diverse range of employees who speak different languages, have various educational backgrounds, and come from all over the world. It can be challenging to manage this diversity without some corporate language training program in place. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to integrate such a program – through corporate language services.
E-learning is less expensive than live learning, both in monetary terms and in terms of the time spent by the team. However, companies often face various barriers that prevent them from unlocking the full potential of e-learning. These problems can be divided into several conditional groups:
- Personal barriers of employees. The benefits of e-learning may not be apparent to team members. Some employees may erroneously assume that retraining indicates insufficient training and precedes termination of employment.
- Professional or educational barriers directly. Training programs do not always meet the needs of employees and do not take into account their work schedule, schedule of meetings with clients, and other important nuances. As a result, “students” will begin to forget about their studies in every possible way.
- Lack of knowledge. The lack of knowledge about management and the fundamental tasks of employees. Suppose it is not aligned with the company’s business goals and does not have specific achievable KPIs (which all participants in the process know). The effectiveness will be extremely low in that case.
- Technical problems. E-learning software needs to be customized to run smoothly and fit the size and unique needs of the business. Otherwise, you can get an expensive product that will not give the desired effect.
Benefits of Corporate Language Learning
Employees Can Handle Presentations Better
Staff members with foreign language training are often better equipped to handle client presentations and strengthen positive relationships with staff. It benefits the company and helps reduce conflict by ensuring everyone is on an even playing field when working together. Employees that receive this type of training will find themselves more confident about their professional skills – they know how valuable it can be for both parties involved- from improving business opportunities externalized through its use at work or internally between coworkers.
Learn How to Work in Different Situations
Having the right words at your disposal can make all of the difference in a high-pressure situation. Language training is becoming more and more popular for this very reason, with companies offering their employees English, Chinese corporate language courses and many more languages. So they’re prepared when it matters most: on duty or outside work hours.
Evolves Company Globally
Companies that make a lot of international trade should consider corporate language training for their employees. Research-backed evidence shows how much training helps an organization evolve and build cross-cultural skill sets, so companies might want to take advantage!
Decide on Learning Management System
Any corporate training requires a significant investment. Therefore, even before implementing the Learning Management System (LMS), you need to consider what you want to achieve with this system carefully. Take the planning phase as the longest step in e-learning development.
As a result of the training, employees (depending on their department) must achieve business goals for sales, productivity, or the effectiveness of communication with customers. In addition, setting business objectives for the LMS will subsequently help assess whether the e-learning program is performing as planned and what needs to be changed to get closer to the original KPIs. Developing e-learning without understanding its ultimate goal will lead the project to failure.
It is also worth developing a formal e-learning strategy based on key business goals and corporate learning objectives. It should be a dynamic “philosophy” that reflects business practices, corporate culture, internal and external environment of the company. Therefore, it is worth involving all interested parties in its formation and then – refer to the document each time before developing or changing curricula, programs, and courses to “check the coordinates.”
Learn the Needs of Employees
You can never go wrong by investing in employees and their needs. Therefore, all developed courses should take into account the interests of the team and close its weaknesses. For example, “techies” need to understand how a company’s products work. Training in sales and communication with customers is tied to specific scripts and conversation scenarios — these are entirely different training models.
In this way, your efforts to develop learning will be focused, and the learning materials will be relevant to both the workers and the company. To illustrate: In 2014, Cisco invested in a training program for contractors and personnel. It included more than forty-six courses, and most of the company’s employees and partners at first did not know where to start. Noticing this, Cisco decided to add three levels of certification (specialist, strategist, and master) and several sublevels to the program. LMS has become more understandable and exciting for students – as a result, the company’s employees have completed more than thirteen thousand courses by the beginning of 2018. It is the effect of customizing the training system.
Find the Right Company to Work With
Another critical point is to decide who and how will create a corporate training system for you. You can delegate this task to an internal IT department, buy ready-made courses in the cloud, or hire a team for outsourcing. More often than not, leaders still turn to the second and third methods since hiring and maintaining a large internal corporate training team costs a pretty penny.
Find a reliable IT solution provider with a quality portfolio, positive customer reviews, and an understanding of the business processes in your industry if you choose to outsource. Ask what technical means (for example, animation, interactive formats, the use of 3D or VR technologies) this command uses.
Integrate LMS Into All the Other Systems
Integrating HR systems, analytics, and accounting IT solutions with e-learning programs will help reduce duplication and quickly obtain more accurate data about personnel. For example, synchronization of LMS with BI allows you to create interactive dashboards with the results of employees before and after training – and on this basis, plan their development. It means it helps improve the talent management system and maximize the use and unleash the team’s full potential.
Focus on Details
Try to integrate e-learning into your workflow as painlessly as possible. For example, provide mobile access for employees who are constantly on the move. Consider the language barrier and translate study materials whenever possible if you have an international team.
And pay attention to your staff’s schedule. Develop individual training programs if there are very few employees (busy with work). This approach will allow each “student” to study what is helpful for him in practice. Alternatively, you can use a microlearning format: training courses consist of small modules that can be completed in a few minutes (for example, before a meeting or between work calls).
Learn How You Are Going to Track the Results
One of the critical advantages of e-learning is the ability to track student actions: this allows you to see students’ progress and realize their potential to 100%. For such control to be effective, your HR department must work as closely as possible with the developers of the system and training courses. For example, at one of the projects, a company has developed, together with HRCs, three types of assessment questionnaires: sequential (the questions go one after the other), free (the questions are mixed), and one page. It made it possible to achieve a more accurate assessment of the team’s knowledge.
Make the Employees Fall in Love with the Learning
Employees need to be motivated to study and improve their performance, and recognition of achievements can be a considerable incentive. Therefore, company leaders often set KPIs (for example, the number of customers per month, the number of products sold, etc.) and determine employees’ effectiveness. In case a person has succeeded in a certain period, they receive material or non-material rewards. This element of gamification and competition greatly simplifies the adoption of e-learning in the company.
To Wrap It Up
The following steps can help you integrate corporate language training for employees in your company, and it will improve their skills and make them more productive at work. Moreover, corporate language learning can be a great team-building tool, so apply it now.
To get started, identify what type of speech or writing style needs to be addressed, then choose the appropriate course materials from our library. For example, if we want to teach a person how to use “begs” instead of “asks,” we would need a lesson on subject-verb agreement and tense verb usage with verbs that end in -s, such as beg-.
Once these courses are completed, review each employee’s progress to know where they stand and keep tabs on who has mastered which concepts best.
About the Author
Ryan is a passionate blogger and writer who likes sharing his thoughts and. Now he works as a content editor and internet researcher, you can check his site. He likes to travel and explore new countries.
