Multimedia training technology proves its worth

HR Magazine, May, 1998 by Lin Grensing-Pophal

HR interest in CBT is growing as more companies learn how to justify the initial cost by demonstrating time savings and other benefits.

You have 100 people registered for a change-management training program set up three months ago. At the last minute, the trainer calls in sick, and the program needs to be rescheduled.

You have 24 of 30 people signed up for your own two-hour training session on new legislation affecting your industry. To accommodate the six who are unable to attend the formal session, you'll have to schedule makeup sessions or provide one-on-one training.

Face it: Traditional training methods can be time-consuming and expensive, and present several logistical challenges. They force you to accommodate schedules of multiple participants and busy instructors; they require that employees leave their regular duties to take part in the training; they are difficult to adapt to address the different learning styles and skill levels of participants; and they rarely include follow-up testing to determine if the training has been retained and applied.

At the same time, increasing business demands, the heightened pace of change, turnover, and the need to train and retrain workers place a growing burden on companies to provide the right training at the right time to the right people.

These challenges, and the growing use of new technology in virtually every business setting, have led many organizations to reconsider how they are educating their workforce. While technology-based training (also called CBT, computer based training, multimedia or CD-ROM based training) has been around for a while, it's finally attracting much more attention from HR professionals. They're looking at the variety of advantages it offers to harried training facilitators, as well as the efficiency and effectiveness for businesses struggling to attract, retain and train employees.

A major new trend in HR

"This is a major trend that's occurring, and it's going to dramatically change the face of training over the next several years," says Brandon Hall, Ph.D., a leading expert in the technology-based training industry and editor and publisher of Multimedia & Internet Training Newsletter. Hall identified that trend about five years ago when he recognized that technology-based training represented the future.

The major advantages? "It can be done just in time, just enough, at your own place and at your own pace - which really follows adult learning principles," says Hall. 'This is likely to have a tremendous impact on our field," he adds. "HR managers who are involved in training must become aware of this technology, evaluate it and encourage their organizations to move in this direction because it's going to have a deep and profound effect."

That profound effect already has been realized by a growing number of organizations, such as Kaiser Permanente Federal Credit Union (KPFCU) in Pasadena, Calif.

"New employee orientation used to be performed by a trainer or HR person," says Kay Hoveland, president and CEO of KPFCU, who has quantified the time saved through the use of CBT. "It would take two to four days, depending on how the trainer felt, how much 'chit-chatting' was going on and so forth. Once we got the CBT, we no longer had a training position, and we found that the new employees came through with much more consistency. The really good employees can do it in a day. The average is two days."

The bottom line? Kaiser has cut training time by 50 percent - in some cases by up to 75 percent.

Ideal for entry-level training

Technology-based training is particularly applicable in industries with higher turnover because training costs can be reduced substantially. (One bank executive estimated a reduction of between 50 percent and 75 percent in training costs for new tellers.) While technology-based training has widely varied training applications, it is most valuable for positions that might be considered "entry level" - where turnover is a problem and the issues are quantifiable, straightforward and lend themselves to multimedia presentation. Many types of industries also are using multimedia training for employee orientation.

Multimedia programs capture and hold the interest of users through the integration of text, graphics, illustrations, photographs, animation, still-frame video, motion video, narration, music and computer sounds into one complete computer training program.

"One of the biggest advantages is that it's interactive," says Mark Bennett, president of Total Training Solutions in Madison, Wis., a firm that offers off-the-shelf and customized multimedia training programs. "Unlike some other forms of training, where you may just sit there and not pay attention, here you have to interact with the computer in order to get through the program."

Susan Mitchell, president of MyDAS Marketing in Boulder City, Nev., agrees. The firm specializes in the development of multimedia programs for the credit union market. Over the long term, you're going to end up with education that is available at the student's fingertips, she says. If people want to learn, they can go in, get certified and prepare themselves for career development.