Scale Your Training Program: 3 Successful Models

A well-trained, effective, and efficient team is key to a successful clinical trial. Especially in the post-COVID world of changing work modalities, implementing a training program can seem more confusing than ever.

The forced exodus to all-virtual environments opened the door to more flexibility in developing and delivering training. With the changed landscape, training now has the potential for greater effectiveness and efficiency. Finding the best solutions starts with evaluating your training needs. Let’s review the breakdown of types, goals, principles, and strategies for ensuring you have a trained and effective team.

The Three Models of Site Training

With so much material to cover, it can be difficult to know where to start. Also, there are different ways to convey the same information. When thinking of the best training avenue for your audience, think of three common training models:

• Live training: Always synchronous (scheduled/real-time interactions), delivered in person or virtually
• eLearning: Delivered live, self-paced (asynchronous), or scheduled
• Blended: Delivered in person and self-paced, live virtual and self-paced, or in an asynchronous cohort

Each model has its benefits and its drawbacks. Live training can be conducted in person or virtually. This type of training means immediate feedback, and gives the option for live coaching and community building. But live training is both tricky to scale up and more expensive, given the costs of travel, time, staff, and space. Additionally, the information is delivered outside of the work environment, meaning it’s decontextualized and possibly less sticky.

eLearning, which became ubiquitous during the pandemic, offers a unique set of benefits, including:

• Improved knowledge retention
• Consistency
• Cost efficiency
• Easy to scale and schedule

Keep in mind, however, eLearning programs require a big upfront effort and expense to develop, not to mention technologic proficiency.

A blended approach combining live and eLearning models is often the best of both worlds, facilitating knowledge retention, efficiency without losing contextualization, lower cost to productivity, scalable, easy to schedule, consistent, and can include live coaching. Again, scheduling and developing resources remain the key challenges for the blended model.

Training Principles, Motivations, Tools, and Success Metrics

Advarra looks at training through the lens of awareness and automation, in which the type of retention required drives the degree of automation used in the training. For example, if an employee needs to simply remember things, high automation – such as eLearning – may be perfectly sufficient. If an employee needs to understand and execute complicated steps, live training may be most appropriate.

Understanding the “why” behind training is crucial for adult learners. While the significance of communicating the training’s relevance is always important, it’s even more pressing in the context of eLearning. Here are four principles to follow when developing your training program:

1. Make sure your staff knows the “why” behind the material
2. Be clear on when and how they will use the skills they are learning
3. Use examples of past successes and highlight problems training solves
4. Offer ways the employee can continue training on their own via self-guided materials and other resources

Creating, Delivering, and Tracking Your Training

Fortunately, many of the tools necessary to create and deliver content are probably already in house. Content production tools include the Microsoft Office suite, Adobe suite, Articulate Suite, Google Suite, and smartphones. For content delivery, consider Zoom or other teleconference products, email platforms, messaging tools, QR codes, wikis, and SharePoint. To deploy, track, and measure results, consider Office Suite and/or Google Suite: O365 Power Automate, Google forms, wikis, the company’s intranet, and even a simple spreadsheet.

Metrics of Success

Finally, how do you assess a successful training? Has the information stuck for everyone? There are several metrics, from anecdotal to measurable success. Live trainings rely on staff feedback, user surveys, and the instructor’s impressions, as well as quizzes and/or projects, which is also useful for eLearning. A longer-term metric is simply on-the-job feedback from supervisors and job performance reviews. As your training program grows, keep track of the results and adjust your approach accordingly.

How Advarra Creates Scalable, Effective, and Efficient Training

No matter where you are in your company’s training program, Advarra Training can make it more effective with our three tiers of training, divided by effort through the lens of production and delivery.

Tier One: Easy-to-scale, high-production effort wherein the employee does the training virtually and asynchronously, with self-service access to existing content provided and delivered by Advarra.

• Easily scaled, low effort
• Client uses existing Advarra resources
• Low effort by client involvement

Tier Two: Training involves low production effort and medium delivery effort, meaning we work together to adapt training materials to your needs. Materials can be streamlined but are not automated.

• Scalable, but with more effort
• Client pays for Advarra’s time
• Train the Trainer and Trainer Bootcamp options

Tier Three: High production and delivery effort wherein Advarra creates training for your staff, finding novel solutions to novel problems and providing templated, non-automatic solutions where efficient.

• Lowest scalability, has concentrated impact
• Client pays for Advarra’s time, expertise, and access to unique resources
• Includes contextualized training, paid product training, and certifications

As a partner, Advarra brings certain advantages, insights, and products, including learning management system (LMS) capabilities with a robust eLearning library, reducing the upfront burden of creating your own eLearning program. Learn more about our custom LMS portals, good clinical practices (GCPs) training, HIPAA learning program, and more.

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