Tech for Tech: 5 ways high-tech companies can use technology to improve learning

Aug 10, 2023 | Articles, Enterprise Learning, Learning Management System, Mobile Learning, Technology Industry

technology devices keyboard, cell phone and earbudsThe technology industry can feel like a whirlwind at times. Things change at a breakneck pace. What was cool yesterday is passe by next week. And, competition is fierce. There’s no such thing as sitting back and enjoying a leadership position in the market. We need to keep pushing and pushing the envelope to stay at the forefront of the world’s fastest moving industry.

While all of this is usually exciting and fun, it can also be extremely demanding and maybe a little daunting. So, for our fellow tech firms out there, I’ve come up with a handful of ideas to help you stay on top of your game (even as the game changes mid-play). From new software developments to augmented intelligence and virtual reality, there are opportunities to learn new skills in tech at every turn. These changes are not without challenges, but hopefully you can use these tips to explore how learning can improve everyday functions in the tech industry.

1. Get innovative solutions faster.

Tech companies watch each other. We know what’s up, not just with competitors, but with innovation in general. Something cool has just come out? We want to get our hands on it. We’re techies, for goodness sake! This isn’t just fun, it also enables us to discover emerging solutions to complicated problems. The challenge from there is to educate our teams on these systems as quickly as possible, before the tool becomes outdated or outperformed by a competing product. Using the LMS, companies can train knowledge workers faster, so they can take advantage of these cutting-edge solutions right away, even as these technologies are just being released to the broader market. As the software changes and evolves, these updates can be incorporated into learning and taught to the professionals who need to master the concepts in order to do their work.

2. Be smart about creation versus curation.

By experimenting with new technologies like augmented intelligence or virtual reality, these unique capabilities can help your tech firm move closer to the cutting edge of technological advances. These new technologies bring unique and unprecedented features into the mix, however, which can make traditional training inadequate or ineffective. The tip here is to work smart; buy off-the-shelf course content to train on well-known, ubiquitous solutions and focus your internal content creation on these new technologies for which there may not be existing content available for purchase.

3. Implement collaborative solutions across departments.

Some apps or platforms are more effective when they can be leveraged across departments. Establishing these interconnected technological systems takes time and commitment from leaders across the company, so be patient and put a strategic plan together. It’s not going to happen overnight, but if you work together, you can potentially maximize the effectiveness of a certain category of solutions such as collaboration, gamification or other social platforms. These also provide meaningful opportunities for support and cooperation across the organization, which almost always lead to better engagement and outcomes for the company.

4. Offer training that adjusts with industry advances.

There’s nothing more frustrating than developing training programs for products that have been poorly implemented and/or adopted by the time the training is ready. Your learners have already formed a negative opinion about the solution before they’ve been properly trained on it. To avoid this problem, use an LMS that adjusts at the pace of the technology industry, making it possible to develop courses for even the newest technological advances extremely quickly. As computers become smarter, there are also possibilities to train technology professionals on maximizing their own automated learning processes. If you’re a Litmos customer, you’ll see that there will soon be ways to incorporate augmented intelligence into your learning programs, creating courses that take learning to new levels of intuitiveness and interactivity.

5. Create teams to test new solutions.

Teamwork is essential to any successful business, but none more so than tech. To implement successful technology solutions, you do need to perform some level of testing, but rather than singling out only your QA or Support groups to do this often tedious work, consider using cross-departmental teams. They can share the workload and compensate for the time and resource constraints of any single contributor. You can use team-based testing and learning experiences to provide better technology outcomes as well because people from different disciplines bring different skills and competencies (as well as weaknesses) to the table, which all help expose areas where more or less training may be needed for particular groups.