Remember when you needed a phone book to find the number to summon a taxi? How about the last time you ordered clothes out of a print catalog? Have you ever bought a road map and tried to read it while driving to your destination?
If you answered “yes” to any of these (sorry for reminding you of your age), aren’t you glad you don’t have to do any of those things anymore?
What do all of these things have in common? Paper. The point we’re getting at is that doing business has evolved with the rise in popularity of mobile devices. Unreliable and inefficient methods of going about our daily lives have been replaced with simple, easy-to-use apps like Uber, Amazon, and Google Maps-all located on one device that you hold in your hand. (Maybe even using one to read this!)
So why on earth is your company still using outdated employee training manuals and documentation when you use mobile for so many other personal and business needs?
Paper is Pricey
Forget "where's my flying car," we want to know where our paperless office is. Think of how much time and resources are spent pushing out paper training documents.
The design and proofing process can take an inordinate amount of time, especially if you're printing color sheets. Then there's the actual cost of printing the documents. And delivering the documents. Removing the old training set, adding the new. All of this has to be done by a human.
And at the end of it all, by the time the documents get to you, someone is probably already working on an update.
How does it still make sense to use paper manuals for training your staff when you have the ability to quickly make updates-with no physical waste-through an app?
Desktop is Dated
Relegating a new employee to the “training computer” never made sense, but anymore it separates the training from the actual task. Mobile training allows trainees to access training documents while recreating the process at the point of execution. This type of training helps two kinds of learners - people who learn by watching and others who learn by doing.
Unplug your training and let your employees learn where they work.
DVDs are Done
Let’s face it, DVDs are the digitized version of paper. Sure, it’s nice to have the collector’s edition, extended cut of Lord of the Rings on DVD, but that’s not the same as the instructional DVDs you show to employees in training.
The cost of producing training DVDs is counterintuitive when you consider the fact you’ll likely need to make a new one in 6 months time to incorporate changes and updates to training methods. Automatically sending a new video file to a tablet is more cost effective and efficient.
Times have changed; the world doesn’t just move faster – it’s fully mobile. Shouldn’t your business be able to keep the pace?
Download our case study about Chipotle’s mobile training and then learn how to launch your own mobile training program.
