The global pandemic has dramatically changed many aspects of our personal and professional lives, including learning and development. While the transformation from traditional face-to-face training to virtual alternatives has been ongoing for decades, it has gone into overdrive in just the past month thanks to COVID-19.
As the entire workforce struggles to reskill, whether they sit in the same office or see each other on a computer screen, the challenge ahead of us is to deliver impactful, easy to deploy development opportunities that enable people to learn new skills to succeed in the new normal. Korn Ferry offers best-in-class e-Learning and Virtual Classroom Experiences that ensure that talent development can continue entirely online, regardless of geographic location and time.
The best virtual classroom experiences keep learners engaged in three ways:
In times of business disruption, learning and development is needed more than ever. We'll share best practices for converting to virtual learning experiences.
Every day, COVID-19 is raising new and complex questions for leaders and organizations to answer. Korn Ferry’s Albertina Vaughn shares her perspective and advice.
[ swipe left to reveal more ]
The virtual classroom experience brings together a comprehensive web-conferencing platform with insightful instructional design, to deliver an engaging and interactive experience for participants, growing their skills and moving them toward behavior change. They can be used in two ways:
We deliver engaging virtual experiences that drive behavior change.
We have a portfolio of over 30 virtual learning experiences for individual contributors and leaders. We’ve focused on a few here that are particularly relevant for the current situation.
We have a portfolio of over 30 learning experiences.
Now is the ideal time for employees to use their downtime to continue their ongoing personal development virtually. We have a portfolio of self-paced e-learning and virtual classroom experiences to choose from. This includes:
We offer virtual learning for all levels of leaders and individual contributors.
Our programs are ready to implement immediately and can be easily scaled globally and across many participants. We can also tailor the programs to your own context and priorities, or build bespoke virtual learning experiences drawing on content and expertise from across Korn Ferry’s ecosystem.
We can deliver at scale now or customize programs to your needs.
This crisis will no doubt expose critical capability gaps in the workforce, and as they emerge from the crisis it’s likely that many companies will be looking for ways to help their people become more agile and adopt a growth mindset. We can work with you to transform your workforce on a mass scale with customized Virtual Learning Academies. We build success profiles for specific roles or levels, run assessments and feedback, and deliver virtual learning through our state-of-the-art training platform.
We can build Virtual Learning Academies to upskill your whole workforce.
In our hands it’s more than just data. We use it to build the DNA of outstanding leaders, effective organizations, high performance cultures and game-changing reward programs. In your hands it can continue to inform smarter decisions backed by more than 4 billion data points, including:
– Over 69 million assessment results
– 8 million employee engagement survey responses
– Rewards data for 20 million employees across 25,000 organizations and 150+ countries
E-learning, distance learning, and other virtual learning opportunities have much to offer organizations in ordinary times. They save money because they eliminate travel and accommodation costs. They can be condensed and are scalable. But virtual learning during the coronavirus pandemic offers even more benefits: it allows employee training and coaching to continue, even with social distancing and remote working initiatives.
But with the rise of online learning, organizations face new challenges too: they can’t just use their same instructional materials in an online environment and expect to engage learners the same way they do in person. They need ways to address the two key challenges of operating in a virtual classroom: virtual learning engagement while social distancing and learning and measuring their learners’ engagement.
First, virtual learning engagement is difficult. Organizations must recognize that participants in e-learning are prone to distraction. When learners log in to a virtual classroom from their computer, phone, or tablet, they have a panoply of distractors at their fingertips, whether it’s their email, social media, news updates, or online games. Organizations need to deliver relevant learning content that is interactive and keeps learners engaged.
Second, they need to figure out how to measure their learners’ engagement. When trainers or leaders are in an in-person learning and development environment, they can see people taking notes or nodding off, so they can adjust their delivery, if necessary, to re-engage those who have lost interest. Virtual facilitators must compensate for the loss of these visual cues and use technology and techniques to encourage participation and track virtual learning engagement.
Many organizations transitioning to virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic have worried about its effectiveness. In part, that’s because they’re used to traditional virtual training. Traditional virtual learning has minimal impact on engagement, because little thought goes into how these presentations need to differ from in-person classes; organizations typically reuse the same materials for their distance learning sessions as they do for in-person training. As a result, participants are prone to distraction, and it is impossible to know how engaged attendees are.
Here is a short list of the drawbacks of traditional e-learning, where organizations don’t design sessions to reflect the demands of the virtual world:
Fortunately, distance learning platforms have evolved significantly over the last few years to increase opportunities for employee virtual learning engagement, accountability, and action. Virtual learning takes place on the phone or online, using a remote conferencing tool.
Korn Ferry believes that the most effective virtual classroom experiences are designed to build virtual accountability. In this model, not only does the learner engage with the material, but the facilitator and the rest of the group also hold each learner accountable for their engagement.
The Korn Ferry model of virtual accountability requires organizations to design the learning experience to hold learners accountable on at least one of these three levels:
Distance learning experiences that incorporate these three accountabilities can improve engagement and drive behavior change, especially those that activate each area at least once every minute.
To keep participants engaged in virtual learning during the coronavirus, organizations should follow these best practices:
Organizations should follow these three approaches to ensure the virtual coaching experience is at least as effective as it would be if it were face-to-face.
When deciding whether to use video or audio virtual learning during the coronavirus crisis, take stock of the situation and your learners. Here is a quick guide for when video may serve your learning purposes best:
However, video is not always the best choice for online learning opportunities. Here’s why:
Organizations should take these factors into account when choosing the right vehicle for their organization’s virtual learning.
Here are several considerations that organizations should keep in mind when they are forced to transition from in-person learning to virtual learning during the coronavirus crisis.
A pandemic doesn’t have to put an end to your organization’s efforts to develop your people. Learning and development are always powerful ways to engage your workforce—and particularly now, while everyone is socially distanced.
Despite social distancing, investing in online learning and development shows your people that you aren’t solely motivated to get your business back up and running during the crisis; your organization wants to support, encourage, and motivate its most valuable resource—its people—too.
Contact us to learn more about how Korn Ferry can support your organization’s e-learning initiatives, whether that’s offering critical learning during the coronavirus for leaders, building a continuous learning program for self-development for leaders and individual contributors, upskilling your workforce, or a creating a custom virtual classroom or other distance learning experience.