One of the most common concerns we hear from clients involved in training is keeping the training content updated. Today, a number of factors make job content more volatile than ever before, so changes in training content always occur. More and more companies have adopted new digital technologies, changing how the work gets done. Other companies have altered their line-up of products or services, impacting what work is actually done. One other factor often discussed, governmental requirements, brings about a personal memory for me. Many years ago, while working with a global tax and audit firm, all the pages and dividers were removed from several hundred three-ring binders and unceremoniously thrown into a dumpster, because new business tax reporting regulations made the current training content obsolete. Many companies have come to expect a continuous cycle of replacing obsolete training content, knowing that aspects of the new content will itself become outdated, and those documents must be eventually replaced.
Delivering inaccurate training content can be costly and even dangerous, especially when performing tasks that have quality and safety consequences. In a costly scenario, a client company that manufactures vegetable oil in large batches had to manually empty several tank trucks so that the product could be returned to the production process to add a missing ingredient required by the customer. Does this unfortunate scenario sound in any way familiar to readers? Why did this occur? Simply because lab technicians did not receive updated training information on interpreting the newly-instituted production forms.
In the past, updating structured on-the-job training (S-OJT) materials could be especially challenging. This is because S-OJT materials come directly from task analysis information. In large projects, updating the S-OJT materials, when many tasks might be involved, was daunting to say the least.
Today, there’s a new way to effectively address this important concern. SiTUATE – the digital version of S-OJT – is designed to update training content automatically. That is, as changes are made to the task analysis, the same changes appear simultaneously downstream in the embedded onboarding module, the S-OJT training guides, the performance checks that occur at the end of the training, and in the employee’s training plan. Those are all the key training system components. Now, clients are less fearful when inevitable changes in training content occur, since they have more control over the revision process, resulting in less confusion in the work areas and, of course, fewer obsolete training materials to be thrown in the dumpster. This is really good news for us all.
For more information about SiTUATE, please contact us.