Online Job Training Should Complement, Not Substitute, Face-to-Face Training

Online job training has its advantages and disadvantages. But overall, online job training is very useful, especially when combined with face-to-face training. 

For example, I’ve worked with a large company that has offices all over the United States, which makes classroom training more difficult. So what I do is, I assign everyone some online job training to complete; then we get together via web conference as a large group and discuss the learning and application it has to their organization and how we’re going to use it. 

Since this particular company’s employees are spread-out across the country, it’s difficult for us to have too many face-to-face training sessions, which is why it’s nice for the employees to be able to do online job training. That way when we can get together to meet, we don’t have to do too much training, per se, but instead we spend the time discussing how the online training can be applied to their job. This seems to work really well for them. 

I think one of the things a lot of companies get hung up on when they think about online learning is the fear that this will replace face-to-face training; so I just want to specify  that online job training shouldn’t be a substitute for face-to-face training. It should be a complement to it, because there’s still a need for face-to-face training. 

You don’t want to go from one extreme—face-to-face training only—to another extreme—online job training only. There’s a balance that you want to create. 

The reason I say this is because, when working with a group of people, there’s an element of online job training that can reduce the group’s need to meet as frequently.

For example, if the group was going to be working on problem-solving, they may need some training to help them with the skills and process to excel in problem-solving. You could definitely use online job training to teach them this, but you’d still want to bring them together as a group to do some kind of face-to-face recap of the training and talk about how it applies to the tasks-at-hand. 

Online job training is also great for “pre-training”—employees can get some preliminary training before attending an in-person training class.  

Training should be comprehensive, and doing a combination of face-to-face and online job training is a great way to accomplish this.

Overall, online job training is very useful, especially when combined with face-to-face training.