Dr. George Selix, KM & Learning Consultant, discusses the necessity for expert performance in digital adoption and how L&D professionals may help beginners perform expertly when it matters most.

What is the ultimate purpose of delivering training, I want to ask you before we get too further into the subject.

I have over 40 years of experience, and I can tell you that when you are training personnel, you are not interested in how many hours they have worked or what their post-test results are; you are concerned with making sure that they can complete their allotted task at the end of the day

The three L&D topics I’d like to cover are the training perspective, how customers view digital adoption, and the learning philosophy that L&D professionals should follow for the ever-changing training demands. These topics will help you increase digital adoption tackle adoption challenges and drive expert performance at your respective organizations.

The Training Perspective

Let’s look at a 2-dimensional graph where emotion and complexity are represented by the X and Y axes, respectively, to appreciate the overall training perspective. Low-complexity, low-emotion tasks are represented by the bottom left corner, whereas high-complexity, high-emotion tasks are represented by the top right corner. A trainer’s responsibility is to mentor new employees as they transition from low-emotion, low-complexity duties to high-emotion, high-complexity tasks and helps the user adoption.

A week or two of user-onboarding or initial skill acquisition training is typically followed by a combination of on-the-job training, formal training, and experience to prepare new hires for work with a higher level of complexity and emotion.

For instance: Your customer service representative (CSR 1) in a call center will likely be at the bottom, where they have just finished their training. To develop into a CSR 2, CSR 3, and finally a CSR 4, they must go through official training and OJT.

The right personnel in the proper locations with the necessary talents to execute the job have long been sought after by organizations. However, as more customers utilize digital technology, this situation is shifting.

It only makes sense that we take into account how a client views digital adoption and digital transformation that will influence how we train our staff.

Digital Adoption from a Customer’s Perspective

The same criteria (emotion and complexity) will serve as the foundation for my discussion of how technological improvements have changed the perspective of customers.

We started moving toward self-service as technology developed over time. The vector is not going to alter, as depicted in the graph, and technology will continue to advance toward tests of greater complexity or emotion. We need to have better digital adoption solutions to bridge the gap.

Self-service capabilities are essential from a commercial and operational standpoint since they save costs. Such a self-serve system can operate with little expense and human involvement once it is built (much like AI chatbots). If you already have chatbots, you don’t need to use numerous resources to answer client calls.

Here, self-service and full-service jobs go without saying. What do you know about aided services, though?

Balanced use of technology is shown by assisted services, which let users take self-service a step further. Whatfix and other digital adoption tools can be used in this situation. You may also see how knowledge management systems, chatbots that employ AI, analytics, and other tools are used.

We can observe that because our consumers do these lower complexity, lower emotion jobs on their own, self-service eliminates a large portion of them. We may also observe that assisted service is stealing some of these tasks. Therefore, our position as L&D experts grows as those vectors continue to move forward with technology and as things like products and prices, processes, consumers, and rivals continue to change.

Learning Philosophy for L&D Practitioners

So how has the role of an L&D Practitioner changed?

Our goal in the current situation is to empower beginners to function like experts in an emergency, which can be done in one of three ways:

• Gauge the Skill Requirement: It is challenging to keep up with and become knowledgeable in all areas due to the rapidly changing technology ecosystem and company requirements. Consequently, it is crucial to recognize what talents are needed and when they are needed. The essential skill set will change depending on the position and sector. However, digital adoption platforms are useful for assisting employees.

• Unified Content Model: A consumer can contact your business through a variety of channels, including a performance support system (Whatfix), live chat, AI chat, and live agents. All of these channels should deliver the same information. Therefore, a consistent content model or knowledge management system should be in place to handle changes in the material made by various departments (IT, Legal, Operations, Marketing).

• Governance: Risk reduction is essential for every organization, and the best way to do so is to ensure that the knowledge we rely on to perform our jobs and communicate with customers is governed.