“Drip” strategies, text and email follow ups… sounds like marketing 101, right? True, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t apply these same strategies to your learning ecosystem. Those strategies work for a reason, especially when you remember the Rule of Seven. People must see or hear something seven times before it sticks. We designed the Reinforce tool to do exactly this. 

You can implement drip strategies to advertise new courses. Remind learners to take required courses, and follow-up after training to increase retention and maintain engagement with content. This not only keeps you top of mind with that audience. It also drastically increases their adoption of the skills and information covered in the training. You could manually send emails, set up text messaging, or use the Reinforce tool to send notifications for tips, reminders, quizzes, or anything to refresh their memories and keep them thinking. If the training event was an eLearning course, you could even include parts of the original course to help kick start their recall. 

Use this strategy to give learners a clear path forward by providing information on upcoming training or continuing education that builds on what they’ve already learned.

We have a one of a kind training tool that can assist with the training and “Reinforcing” learning concepts within your company. They can use them on the go to really drive in the knowledge your team is trying to convey.

Need more ideas to make the most of your content? Curious about the Reinforce tool? Drop us a line.

The post A Modern Tactic to Revolutionize your Training first appeared on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

The post A Modern Tactic to Revolutionize your Training appeared first on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

The Need: To communicate a new process to your team and place reference material at their fingertips.

Process training can be challenging to build even under perfect circumstances. Consider that there is a new process that your learner must follow. It’s not a process they’ll go through every day. To resolve this, they need to understand why the process is in place. Then have reference material to use when they need to move through the process.

We have great examples of implementing and communicating process changes like this with success. Let’s dig in.

eLearning Solution

The Client: Our first case study is with an international Fortune 500 company with around a quarter of a million employees. Sounds like a fun holiday party, no?

Training Need: They needed help training a thousand hiring managers on a brand new complex interview and selection process.

The Challenges:

Lots of elements of this project combined to make it a unique puzzle:

• New process.
• Change management needed.
• Technically complex.
• Geographical spread out audience.

Our Solution:

This is how we got the puzzle pieces to fit:

• Designed a video-based eLearning
  • Reach geographically dispersed hiring managers.
  • Speak directly to the hiring managers to illustrate the value of this process change.
  • Provide in-depth demonstrations of the technology.
  • Allow for practice of what they learned.

Blended Solution

The Client: Our second case study is with one of the largest family-owned businesses in the US.

Training Need: They needed help creating training and communications for the rollout of a new vendor management system and program for managing their contractor staff.

The Challenges:

Similar to the first client, this was a big change for the company and employees.

• New process and shift from not having a process, to having clear and well-documented guidelines, policies, and procedures.
• New technology.
• Large and varied audience.

Our Solution:

Here’s how we stepped in:

• We implemented a blended solution that:
  • Included a series of in-person sessions for those on-site.
  • Included an eLearning that held the same material for those who were unavailable to attend.
  • Allowed concerned parties to ask questions and get answers and support in real time.

Ready to get your message out? Let’s create something together. 

The post Creating Impactful Process Training first appeared on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

The post Creating Impactful Process Training appeared first on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

How staff augmentation offers scalability

New team members don’t grow on trees. Therefore, when you need to expand your team, it’s time to start the lengthy process of hiring a new employee—or is it? Staff augmentation can offer you instant scalability to meet that need. Want help building your dream team?

Staff augmentation is when you bring in outside personnel on a temporary basis. Augmentation can fill in expertise gaps or simply expand a team to meet an impending deadline. 

A winning team with flexibility

Businesses need to be lean, mean, fighting machines to stay profitable in today’s market. Consequently, you don’t have extra staff sitting around, and the staff you do have don’t always have the ability to flex and meet a short-term need. 

Updates

How do you regularly review your training programs for edits and updates? Staff augmentation can be hugely beneficial here to take the burden off your training team. Whether you need just one person or a whole team, you can get the right expertise to ensure your training materials are on-brand and up-to-date. 

Large projects

What if you need to completely overhaul your training program? Staff augmentation can provide expertise on the latest training and instructional trends. Get expertise in instructional design, project and SME management, graphic design and video and motion graphic design with just one call to Skosh Learning. Once the overhaul is complete, Skosh leaves your training team with a shiny new sustainable training program. Now that’s a win-win!

High demand

How do you handle an increased demand for training? Staff augmentation. When your training team gets hit with more training requests and projects than they can manage, add more team members! When things slow down, those extra team members will move on. No muss, no fuss. 

Whether you have cyclical needs, one huge project, or an influx of work, Skosh can become part of your team to help you hit that home run!

When you are ready to call up some extra team members, give us a ring.

The post Put us in, Coach! first appeared on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

The post Put us in, Coach! appeared first on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

Seeing a dramatic drop-off in adoption? Underwhelming training results? Sounds like you may have an information retention problem. Luckily, there’s a tool to help you solve this problem. Here are our top three follow-up strategies using our Reinforce tool AFTER an event to make your training stick:

1. Get the information back in front of them

Did you know that it can take hearing something seven times before it sticks? Don’t let it be a one-time thing. Keep information in front of your audience with reminders, bonus email content, webinars, group calls, helpful tips, and content replays. With Reinforce, you can schedule timed notifications and emails to ensure your audience receives this content consistently.

2. Create challenges and quizzes after the fact

Send challenges to your audience to keep their skills sharp. Case studies, quizzes, and games all help to provide extra practice to keep the information fresh and useful. To take it up another notch, provide prizes for the person who correctly completes a challenge first. Reinforce tracks goals that are set by both the administrator and the user. When these goals are achieved, consider rewarding individuals with a little goodie. The Skosh Reinforce tool allows you to create a series of tasks that could be eLearning material, links to content, videos, and PDFs.  

3. Get them talking to each other

The Reinforce tool can help you carefully plan out prompts for your audience to discuss the content in the days and months after the training. Send out discussion questions, or tie the content into a case study challenge. This helps address any questions or confusion that may be lingering and helps turn your audience into teachers of your content. 

Looking for more help getting your training to stick? Curious about the Reinforce tool? Drop us a line. 

The post 3 Follow-Up Strategies that Make Your Training Stick first appeared on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

The post 3 Follow-Up Strategies that Make Your Training Stick appeared first on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

How can we make you a success? Hear it from our staff augmentation clients:

“I had an enormous challenge: I needed to redesign and rebuild an entire library of very technical systems training in a very short timeframe.

The nuts and bolts of the challenge

Specifically, I had almost 400 elearning courses (more than 50 hours of content) that had to be done in 6 months. Honestly, I didn’t think this was a feasible goal, but the Skosh team jumped in, rolled up their sleeves, and got to work. 

How Skosh made the impossible possible

The quality of their work was exceptional: the instructional design was engaging, the visual style was impeccable, and the writing was flawless. And they finished the whole project with a month to spare. I can still barely believe both the quantity and quality of their work, and I’m so happy I had them on the team.

What Skosh can do for you

I think this team can handle any instructional design project. The breadth of topics they covered for me—from soft skills up to the most technical topics in a very technical industry—indicates they can do anything. I can’t wait to work with them again!”

Ready to get some help on that project? Give us a call.

The post Feeling the Love from Our Staff Augmentation Clients first appeared on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

The post Feeling the Love from Our Staff Augmentation Clients appeared first on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

A major software company had a training program they provided to their clients to help them learn the ins and outs of their software. The training program’s courses had some issues. The courses were hard to reference, had a high level of complexity, and were too long, forcing learners to click through slide after slide to find the topic they needed. Additionally, they were using an out-of-date course software and their courses were lacking a single unified voice or context. All of this left them without the ability to scale their training and make it more self-driven to meet the needs of their national and international customers. Recognizing a need, they sought a solution through staff augmentation.

The solution

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Skosh Learning bringing project and SME management and instructional design expertise to the rescue! 

Project and SME management: Get it right the first time 

If that sounds too good to be true, it’s not. Skosh Learning accomplished this feat by breaking down the software company’s existing content into bite-sized courses. These new smaller courses were easier for the customers to reference if they just needed help on a single topic, but we also developed specific learning paths to take the learner on a journey through the entire software. We relied on our seamless collaboration with their training team to ensure we broke topics up in a logical manner and covered them fully in each course. Working with the team during the brainstorming process led to a limited reliance on SMEs; Skosh only used 1 SME hour per week on average!

Additionally, Skosh Learning brought to bear our considerable project management skills to deliver courses ready-to-eat:

• Assigned topics to our team members based on their expertise to reduce demands on SME
• A rigorous internal review cycle to deliver the best-form content to the client
• A SME review cycle certify the accuracy of the content 

Instructional design: Action-focused courses

With a six month timeframe, Skosh Learning converted the almost 400 eLearning courses in the client’s library to 229 courses that were short and concise thereby meeting the company’s need for referenceable courses. Using our instructional design expertise as a guide resulted in courses which emphasized interaction and provided context for why the learner would want to complete a particular action. The cherry on top? Skosh completed the project one month ahead of schedule!

We’ll be there for you… when you’re ready to get more out of your training! 

Let us help you with your training project!

The post The One Where We Conquer Staff Augmentation first appeared on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

The post The One Where We Conquer Staff Augmentation appeared first on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

THE MYTH: Companies have no need for staff augmentation, right? Wrong. It’s not possible nor is it good for your bottom-line to employ someone to meet every single unique need of your business. Even in times of influxes of work, it can be much more efficient to look to staff augmentation.

THE TRUTH: Staff augmentation provides expertise when you need it, and only when you need it without all of the overhead. Still not sold?

Does this sound familiar? You have a big project, but your team isn’t big enough and may not have all the necessary skill sets. You run the numbers and hiring new team members just isn’t in the budget for a one-time project. Do you muddle through with the team you have and produce a product that doesn’t meet your standards or even your needs? Seeking outside help to augment (or outsource) your team can bring in unique skill sets to act as a force multiplier. This is staff augmentation in a nutshell.

At Skosh Learning, we specialize in staff augmentation! Why? We recognize building top-notch training programs requires a multitude of individuals with unique skill sets that you may not need day in and day out, so we take care of bringing those people and skills to you. Skosh can bring the following expertise to bear for your project:

• Project and SME management
• Instructional design 
• Graphic design 
• Video and motion graphic design

But wait, there’s more! Unlike the extra products you can get by ordering now on the home shopping network, at Skosh we build upon the expertise we can offer you. Our flexible approach to building training programs aids in seamless collaboration with existing teams, so we don’t waste time recreating organizational knowledge and experiences. Not to be overlooked is our extensive (but not time consuming) review process to ensure content and design meet your exacting needs and standards. 

Let us help you tackle that training project!

The post Staff Augmentation 101: How to Get the Expertise You Need first appeared on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

The post Staff Augmentation 101: How to Get the Expertise You Need appeared first on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

Giving Customer Service a Soul

Empathy: something we all crave, especially in customer service experiences. It can be a hard thing to define, and even harder to train. Despite this difficulty, it’s often the small things that can make or break customer service interactions. Having an empathetic person on the other end of the line can make all the difference, especially when emotions are high and you’re frustrated.

One international beauty company recognized this as a game-changer and had begun to develop an in-person training to help improve empathy skills. Scaling their ILT (instructor-led training) to all of their markets was critical to their mission, but they didn’t want to lose the impact of the training. They worried that a move to eLearning would mean a serious decrease in effectiveness and behavior change, and simply become a box to check for employees to fulfill their training responsibilities. That’s where we come in.

We partnered with this company and the instructor to help not just convert the training from instructor-led to eLearning, but we redesigned the training to be just as impactful as their ILT version, across a different modality.

Rethinking what has worked phenomenally in person to be sound and memorable in an online format can be extremely challenging. It’s important to remember what makes each modality valuable, and leverage those interactions. What can’t be simulated in an online experience, can often be used as supplemental assignments outside of the training with in-person grounds, management intervention through manager guides, or detailed action planners with management accountability.

Additionally, considering the difficult nature of teaching empathy and customer service in general, we employed a complex skill-building series of activities that allowed learners to not only see and hear behaviors demonstrated and modeled both correctly and incorrectly, but also practice the behaviors themselves in realistic scenarios in email, chat, in person, and phone conversations.

With all of these strategies in place, we were able to develop a robust online experience that the company was able to take to their offices globally to transform their personal interactions both internally and externally.

Ready to start something big?

The post How an International Beauty Company Started an Empathy Movement first appeared on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

The post How an International Beauty Company Started an Empathy Movement appeared first on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

Adobe Flash has had a good run, but its time has come. Officially, Adobe ended support of Flash Player on December 31, 2020. This may not seem like a big deal, but it may have a negative impact on some of your tried-and-true legacy eLearning modules you’ve been using for the past decade.

You may have already started to notice the changes.

There are a few things you need to be aware of that will be impacted by this change.

LMS Flash Assets

Before you dig deep into all of your trainings, first take a look at your LMS. Does it have any Flash elements that are visible to the end user? You’ll need to test this in different non-Flash-compatible browsers to determine if there are elements not appearing, or requiring Flash enablement. Then, consider if you’ll just remove them, or replace them with non-Flash elements.

Legacy and New eLearning

Your older eLearning courses that were built for Flash or have Flash elements will have to be converted to HTML5. Unfortunately for those older courses, this will be a rebuild, but also opens the opportunity for a redesign! Take this as a positive: now you finally can bring all of your content under an overarching style to create that learning ecosystem that your organization needs.

If you’ve been publishing out your more recent courses in HTML5 with a Flash contingency, you’ll have to republish and reupload those as HTML5 only. The Flash contingency will cause the package to include swf files, which will mess with your output now that the death-date has passed.

Make sure your content is accessible to your learners! If you haven’t started looking at your assets, the time is now.

Need help with your conversion strategy? Give us a call.

The post The Death of Flash first appeared on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

The post The Death of Flash appeared first on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

All you need to do is read a few Yelp reviews to understand the importance of making a first impression. For new employees, your onboarding speaks volumes about the experience they’re about to embark on as a member of your organization. What message are you sending?

Some of the most interesting and creative projects are born when a client feels comfortable making a product that is both fun and funny. Striking the balance between being taken seriously and adding joy through humor is our forte. This combination is the perfect recipe for orientation, allowing new employees to learn important guidelines but also feel excited about joining a new team. First days can be intimidating, and intense rules and regulations without any reprieve can make a new employee feel unprepared and unwelcome.

A nationally recognized Mortgage Company knew their orientation was sending the wrong message. It had a long, drawn-out interview-style video that lost viewers one-minute in. Then, it slogged through guidelines, policies, and logistics. They wanted their new employees to feel excited, welcomed, and part of the team on their first day and this orientation training was not cutting it. Enter Skosh Learning.

Through a fun creative workshop, both teams put their heads together to design a solution that would not only make new employees laugh and smile, but feel welcomed and ready to start in their new role. We knew this needed to include interactivity, humor, helpful information, and further resources, as well as set expectations with the learner about what was most important for them to takeaway from the training.

We created a colorful, playful, and innovative solution that wove together welcoming videos from the C suite of the company, illustrative motion graphics talking about the industry and how the company is structured, and interactive video walkthroughs of their tools, platforms, and interpersonal expectations and core values. Acting as both an introduction to the company and a useful resource, this training helped brand new employees hit the ground running with a smile.

Ready to set your newbies up for success?

The post How Onboarding Changed the Game for a Nationally Recognized Mortgage Company first appeared on Skosh Learning and Technologies.

The post How Onboarding Changed the Game for a Nationally Recognized Mortgage Company appeared first on Skosh Learning and Technologies.