eLearning Courses for Your International Employees: the Why and How of It

Employees are always looking for opportunities to add on to their skills and qualifications. In fact, the attraction of a workplace is not merely in the paycheck. It is in perks such as the learning opportunities that companies offers its people.

In the global workplace, where employees are interspersed throughout the world, it is not always possible to have in-person training programs. This became especially true in a pandemic-stricken world. eLearning rose to the opportunity then and quickly became the chosen approach for companies to train their staff.

In this blog post, we’ll briefly go into why companies must seriously consider eLearning for the upskilling of their staff and how they can go about it efficiently.

Why corporate eLearning

Extensible and faster. You can extend the same eLearning program again and again to employees who qualify for it. You can accommodate every employee in the program and make them conversant with the latest compliance requirements, safety guidelines, and other updates to their skill sets. You can modify the learning modules according to their skills and competencies.

You can also deploy the program in real-time, with just a few clicks. A traditional training program would involve much planning and logistics. Not so with an eLearning program.

With translation and localization, the scalability of the program is extended many times, as you can then roll out the program to all your international staff and use it again and again as required.

An agile approach. You can create shorter training content in iterative cycles as needed, instead of spinning out voluminous content, which is cumbersome to create, as well as consume. It can also get quickly outdated. An agile eLearning approach, on the other hand, keeps in sync with development or production cycles and is very current.
Personalize and accessible. Your employees can take the course at the own pace and from the comfort of their own home. They can take the course on their mobile phone with a high-quality app, which makes for a very rich interactive experience. eLearning also makes it possible for employees in distant corners of the world to be as informed and skilled as anyone else in the company. This brings a sense of equality and inclusion among the employees.
Variety of content. eLearning can be used to teach a variety of topics such as soft skills (including interpersonal skills), hard skills (including new skills and upgrades to existing skill sets), compliance, new employee onboarding, compliance training, and product knowledge training. Different eLearning approaches can be used to teach each of these types of content.

How to design eLearning courses for your employees

Find out their needs. Do not take a top-down approach to eLearning. Your idea of what an employee is looking forward to from an eLearning program may vary from what they might have in mind. Run a few surveys and find out employee expectations before designing a course. Creating a course that will meet employees’ training needs will help to increase better engagement.
Draft a global-friendly course. When you create the course, keep in mind that you can get maximum value for money if you are able to adapt the same course for your international employees. If you are to do this, you must draft the course in a way that you can easily adapt to different locales. You can do this by not using overly local themes in the eLearning program.
Translate and localize. When you launch a training program for overseas staff, remember that translation and localization is a must. Learning in one’s own language always makes it easier and more engaging for anyone.

However, you can’t stop at translation and must include localization as well. Localization refers to the processes that truly adapt the eLearning course to the culture and social background of multilingual learners.

Gamify the course. It helps make it much more interesting and non-intimidating for your learners if you bring in the element of play in the course. Bring in interaction, high-quality graphics, scoreboards so that employees can compete amongst themselves as they go through the course, and byte-sized content so that they can take the course in small pockets of time as they find convenient. For instance, a gamified, byte-sized course can be easily taken during one’s commute.
Include multimedia learning. Video and audio are part of one’s online experience these days. Videos can be found on any topic that you can think of and have shaped people’s expectations very strongly. Learners will come to your course expecting to find video content. Learning visually is also more engaging and compelling for many learners. There is more retention when someone sees something rather than just reads about it.

Corporate eLearning helps companies and their employees equally. It is effective in proactively coping with employee turnover, as constant learning keeps one engaged and feels that they are progressing in their career. Companies also become better at what they do when their employees become better at what they do.

However, the content of the training course must always be in the language of the learner and interesting to them. Partner with experienced language service providers (LSPs) to understand how you can efficiently create and tailor courses for your international employees.