12 Of The Biggest Benefits Of eLearning For Employees
Corey Bleich
🍿 5 min. read
Not only does eLearning save your company money compared to instructor-led training, it does so much more. If you're making a business case for eLearning development, these are the major benefits of eLearning for your employees and company:
- Saves your company money
- Reduces learning time
- Better employee retention for most training topics
- Just-in-time accessibility for worldwide employees
- Provides employees with ongoing access to key resources
- Guarantees a risk-free environment for your employees
- Allows for global collaboration
- Fits your employee's flexible lifestyles
- Scalable for any number of employees
- Provides your employees, and managers, with timely feedback
- Ensures training consistency and standardization
- Reduces your company's environmental impact
Let's look at these advantages of eLearning in more detail.
1. Saves your company money
We'll start with the bottom-line. eLearning is simply more cost-effective for a larger employee audience.
You're reducing fees for trainers and employee time, as well as costs related to training rooms, travel, catering, and materials. For eLearning, on the other hand, employees will just need access to a computer or a mobile phone, and some time, to complete their training.
Training magazine reports that you can save 80% alone in printing costs. Companies have saved thousands by switching to eLearning. These cost savings are one of the clearest advantages of eLearning.
2. Reduces learning time for your employees
Just as eLearning saves you money, making the switch can also lead to huge savings for your employee's time. And it's not an insignificant amount. Did you know that eLearning reduces your employee's learning time by as much as 60% when compared to traditional learning?
eLearning can reduce employee time associated with:
- Starting and wrapping up learning sessions
- Travel time
- Breaks and meals
- Teaching to a group, rather than an individual
3. Better employee retention for most training topics
As we discussed in an earlier post, eLearning is simply a better way to train employees on certain topics.
With gamification, videos, and other interactive content, eLearning can greatly increase your employee's engagement with and retention of key information. This is especially true for specific, concise topics, such as new software training, compliance procedures, or reference guides that they can access on-the-go.
4. Just-in-time accessibility for worldwide employees
Speaking of on-the-go, one of the greatest benefits of eLearning in the workplace is that it's available 24/7 for an increasingly global and remote workforce.
Your employees get to access training when they have the time and capability to do so, no matter where they are.
5. Provides employees with ongoing access to key resources
If your training covers a lot of material that will need to be referenced later—such as new product specifications—eLearning provides your employees with the opportunity to access those resources right when they need them.
Instead of being confined to the classroom, eLearning materials can go wherever your employees go. (Especially with the advent of mLearning, or mobile learning.)
6. Guarantees a risk-free environment for your employees
One of the major drawbacks of instructor-led group training is that some employees will avoid contributing to the lesson because of a fear of failure. eLearning solutions provide employees with an opportunity to fail in a safe environment.
As the eLearning Brothers explain:
"A good learning program shows the consequences of students’ actions and here/why they went wrong. After a failure, students can go back and try again. This type of learning experience eliminates the embarrassment of failure in front of a group."
7. Allows for global collaboration
With an increasingly global workforce, one of the greatest benefits of eLearning is that it can be built to encourage online collaboration across the world.
Some of the best eLearning solutions allow employees from different departments and countries to contribute to larger company discussions, right in the training module itself.
8. Fits your employee's flexible lifestyles
Today's employees demand workplace solutions that fit their lifestyles. Providing training that can be accessed when it works best for them accounts for your employee's need for flexibility, thus improving overall employee morale.
9. Scalable for any number of employees
Once you've created your eLearning modules, they can easily be scaled up to roll out to as many employees as you need, in as many languages as you require.
Instead of trying to find instructors and classroom space to dedicate to training, all that your employees need is access to a computer or mobile phone.
10. Provides your employees, and managers, with timely feedback
Grading multiple paper exams and providing feedback to employee questions all take a considerable amount of time for management. And employees often have to wait to get the feedback they need to do their jobs correctly.
Not so with eLearning. As Bridge explains:
"Employees are able to get real-time feedback during an online training course. And because everything is connected online, management can also get up-to-date analyses on how courses are performing, and they track the progress of individual employees."
11. Ensures training consistency and standardization
Once you've put in the work to create an eLearning course, you know that all of your employees will receive the same high-quality training, no matter where they are.
While the presence of an instructor can create a more dynamic learning environment, not all instructors will focus on the same materials or provide that same level of care. One of the greatest advantages of eLearning is simply ensuring that all of your employees receive the training they need.
12. Reduces your company's environmental impact
Switching to eLearning isn't only financially savvy; it's also better for the environment. As Articulate reports on their blog:
"Producing and providing distance learning courses consumes an average of 90% less energy and produces 85% fewer CO2 emissions per student than conventional face-to-face courses."
What about the disadvantages of eLearning?
Your employees will undoubtedly benefit from eLearning modules on most topics, as will your ROI. But, that doesn't mean that eLearning is always the best solution. There are some disadvantages of eLearning.
For complex, collaborative topics, employees will still get the most benefit from small group training sessions. This is also true for hands-on, mentorship programs. Further, eLearning courses must be designed well so they don't distract the learner with overly flashy graphics or animations.
You can learn more about choosing between eLearning and instructor-led training in our recent post.
Get started with your own eLearning solutions
To learn more about the benefits of eLearning in the workplace, click the button below to get in touch with our team at EdgePoint Learning. We can help you determine if eLearning would be the best option for your company.