By the time 2015 ends, an expected 234.5 million tablets will have been sold for the calendar year. Although that represents a minor slowdown in sales growth, the technology is still as popular as ever, and it continues to make its way into the business world. This emergence is entrenching itself in training processes with favorable results. More than favorable: Companies are loving the potential that tablet training offers.
But compared with established training methods, are tablets the best option on the table? Shaking things up for any company on any process can be a challenge, and organizations become understandably leery in deviating from what they know to be tried and true. However, when improvement, innovation, and productivity are involved, many businesses gladly will make the leap. Tablet training represents one of those leaps; here are some reasons why:
Tablet Training Is More Efficient
Training with traditional methods, such as printed manuals and embarrassingly dated videos on DVDs (or even more ancient, video tapes!), doesn’t produce results as effective as many managers would prefer. Written content is often not comprehended well (if the employee bothers to read it in the first place), and no employee wants to be plopped in front of a television in some back office. Tablets offer a much more efficient means of training. Employees aren’t tethered to a binder or a TV and can consume training content wherever and whenever it’s convenient for them. The quality of the training materials is improved as well—reading on an iPad or Surface isn’t as tedious, and videos often are shorter and more recent and relevant.
Tablet Training Offers the Freshest Content
Another issue with printed training materials is that if a process requires updating, or if there is simply an error within the content, a new volume must be produced. Even digital files sent via email still must be … emailed, with the hope someone is diligent enough to open and distribute the attachment. Today’s tablet-based training solutions provide a proactive way to update content with minimal effort. If a file must be revised, one person at corporate can make a change, and the updates are instantly delivered to every appropriate iPad or Surface throughout the company.
Tablet Training Increases Productivity
Employees who learn faster and more efficiently will naturally be more productive once they apply those skills in the kitchen, on the sales floor, or in the field. But tablets offer an extra advantage: the ability to take training to the kitchen, floor, or field. For example, a cook learning how to make a new menu item can take a tablet into the prep area and watch a training video teaching him or her to do so, rewinding as needed to ensure the process is learned right. Other training methods, short of another cook devoting precious time showing the process to the first cook, don’t offer this sort of direct learning.
Tablet Training Is a Technology for This Decade
Millennials grew up with cutting-edge technology their whole lives, so naturally, they will respond better to tablet training as opposed to other methods. Furthermore, a new workforce is emerging: people born after 1994 (the so-called Generation Z), who have never lived in a world without the Internet, digital video, or cellphones everywhere. Five years from now, the youngest workers won’t know a time when they didn’t go online for any information or media they needed. Sticking with outdated training processes turns off these generations of employees at a time companies will need them most.
How do you think tablet training compares with other options?
