| For the majority of retailers, in-store staff training consists of paper workbooks, sent down from on high. Whilst they contain all the information relevant to the job, they are not particularly exciting or easily updatable. Senior staff and managers are possibly taken offsite and trained collectively, which is a costly and time consuming process.
Now, as employers are required by law to ensure their employees are trained in key legislative subjects, including age restricted sales, trading standards and health and safety issues, some retailers are exploring the use of e-training to ensure they stay compliant – and to make learning potentially more interesting and relevant to their staff. This isn’t to say that it has taken off in a huge way yet, according to head of standards and qualifications at Skillsmart, Beverley Paddey. She believes this is primarily because of resource requirements, namely having dedicated computers in-store. “So it isn’t what I would call being embedded across the retail sector, with some exceptions,” she says.
Those exceptions have discovered a variety of advantages to making use of e-training, including rapid roll-out and update of information, paper savings and reduced travel and assessment time, this being particularly so for those with large staff numbers.
What’s it really good for?
There are, in fact, a number of areas where e-training is superior to more traditional techniques, but this can depend on the market in which a given retailer is working, says Tim Buff, managing director at CM Group. “For example, we’ve just been working with Orange who have to constantly change their tariffs and get new telephones on a fairly regular basis, and they find it difficult without using e-learning to roll-out training fast enough to all of their shops.” CM Group provides an enterprise e-learning platform called Luminosity, which Buff says allows companies to generate e-learning much more quickly than was previously possible.
“Customer services is a big area for us,” says Nick Reed, operations director at Kineo. “And often there are legislative issues as well, so things like health and safety training.” Reed says that, as employees have to meet legislative requirements for governing bodies, and employers need to demonstrate that these have been met, e-training allows them to touch all of their staff reasonably quickly. It also provides a hard record of when a person has been through a course, and whether they passed or failed.
This also goes for FSA regulated products, like store cards. “They’ll need to show that a member of staff has reached a given level of competence, and that they are qualified to sell that to a member of the public.” E-training makes this process much more straightforward. Kineo has recently worked with Marks & Spencer to develop its Line Manager Performance Centre, an e-learning portal for its line managers who are responsible for HR issues.
Another e-training provider is BT Expedite, whose product Jigsaw has been developed on the back of government pushing the new retail NVQ standards. “And with this, we can give (employees) some form of formal qualification and link it through to the NVQ standards process,” says Sally Taylor, head of training at BT Expedite. “So the key thing for us is being compliant with key subjects, and these are linked to competency.”
Retailer Bodycare has recently implemented Jigsaw, in order to reduce its carbon footprint, remove costly paper workbooks and reduce the amount of time its internal assessors spent travelling to and from stores. It also allows it to quickly implement new compliance and legislative subjects within its store induction programme.
Barriers and solutions
As noted, retailers may be put off by e-training because of the increased investment in PCs. Indeed Skillsmart’s Paddey observes that one of her biggest retailers has said they would absolutely not endorse the spend on training terminals. But there are ways around this. “There’s a huge amount of IT infrastructure around stock control and all the various back office systems. I really think if they could utilise their offline infrastructure better, then that would be much more conducive to the retailers than having to purchase more kit,” says Paddey. One way of doing this, she says, is to make use of tills as training terminals, which is precisely what one retailer has been doing for the last three years.
Debbie Kemp, product training manager at Mothercare, says their tills are used to update product information, hold policy manuals for easier access, and most importantly, to train employees on how to actually use the till. Kemp says that before implementing the system, a trainer would need to visit each store, and when staff were replaced, this meant repeat visits. “The beauty of the system for us is that the module is there whenever new people start and the training is available for them; there’s a footprint left behind.”
And what do those being trained think? “They really like it. It’s very structured, and for younger staff it’s the way that they’re used to learning. We’ve found that while there was resistance at first, all of our staff now really like using the tills in that way.”
And aside from tills, e-training can also be delivered to portable devices or home networks. But as Kineo’s Reed points out, the latter is not really common practice. “You’re starting to touch on some sensitive issues around if it is appropriate for people to train at home. Unions would probably start to get a bit jittery if you insisted on this. So it’s a fine balance on that one.”
Worth bearing in mind
For retailers considering the implementation of an e-training solution for the first time, there are a few things to keep in mind. Reed says to start small, so don’t make your first training module a major one like induction, for example. “So if you can take something like a store card launch, there is a key business driver to get that out the door, invariably it is driven by a deadline, and that gives a certain amount of impetus. And it stops the endless debates that can take place around what a piece of learning should look like.”
CM Group’s Buff says to be sure you get back your source files if you’ve outsourced your e-training, and to know what you want at the outset. “The thing that causes the cost to go up enormously is if you haven’t clarified in your own mind, or between you and your supplier, exactly what the look and feel is going to be upfront. Very often if you have to re-work media assets it’s very expensive to do that, just because it’s time consuming. So be sure people are happy with the storyboards before the media is created.”
It is also worth noting that e-training may not be the most cost effective method of delivery for smaller retailers, but for those with a large, dispersed staff, it offers an efficient means of training, while ensuring they don’t fall foul of regulations. And of course, a slick, interactive video module is just so much cooler than a workbook.
top
|
