Will Chadwick, Account Director, shares his thoughts…
I’ve been knocking on doors and selling our supported e-learning infrastructure, mainly to the top tier of the hospitality sector, for over 5 years. In my experience the buying decision has been based upon one of the following 4 reasons. Obviously I cannot divulge which of our clients falls into which category but you know who you are!
1. ‘We have a problem!’
The recent ‘Rogue Restaurants’ programme exposed what happens when training and safety standards are ignored. Environmental Health Officers (EHOs) take a dim view of finding maggots behind freezers or ‘double day dotting’ in fridges and the prospect of taking the scalp of a CEO from a branded pub or restaurant chain must be enticing.
If there is no audit trail to demonstrate a robust training structure then the buck stops with the CEO and fines of £20,000 per site have been applied recently. We then get a call and the internal decision-making process tends to be quite fast if the CEO is aware of the exposure. (Fortunately we have been doing this for a few years and have the infrastructure to roll out a complete training solution very quickly.)
2. ‘Surely there must be a cheaper way of doing this?’
And there is! If any company is still sending employees (normally managers or their assistants) away for a full day of off-site training or conducting one-to-one sessions onsite then e-learning will save huge amounts from an annual training budget. If an external provider is delivering a course the costs can be up to £150 per head before travel, subsistence and backfill labour is calculated.
Of course the problem is that much of this is hidden cost and sits at a site P&L in petty cash for travelling or on the wage line of an internal training team. I did have to bite my tongue recently when I heard a training manager say, “But this type of training is free” as a reason for not embracing e-learning!!!!!
3. ‘We’re training them but they don’t remember any of it.’
And neither would you if you were sat in a classroom for a full day when your normal day job involves working in a busy pub, restaurant or hotel. Or being given a workbook and told to work your way through it. Our recommended time for studying any e-learning material is 30-40 minutes to make sure the knowledge is absorbed properly.
One of our clients recently conducted an external audit to check the differences in kitchen safety standards between sites using e-learning training and those using paper materials. The difference was startling and provided the perfect rationale to convince the rest of the company that e-learning would make them safer.
4. ‘The future has to look better than this!’
Now these ones are great! When a company buys-in to providing training material and information as part of an online service to their teams then I do get excited. Can you imagine the difference when a new starter is offered a well-constructed induction programme which they can also study at home as opposed to ‘learn with Doris’ on your first session? No wonder companies that show career paths to new starters on day one in an enjoyable and engaging format have better retention rates.
The ThirdForce compliance training courses are used in this scenario to ensure everyone within the business sees the value of e-learning and then ‘gets’ how it can be used for wider applications. Even the most hard-nosed Ops guy (or girl) will concede that Food Safety, Health & Safety and Licensing Law training must be done. When they see that the learners enjoy the experience, they have full central visibility of activity AND it saves money then e-learning is seen as the way forward. If the Ops teams buy-in then they make it work and the L&D team can achieve whatever vision they wish to apply thereafter.
Just wait until they see what we are going to provide as part of e-learning 2.0!