The eLearning industry which was already displaying a lot of potential, accelerated even more rapidly in the days following the pandemic. Sanjay Tiwari, co-founder of 21CC Education, that is into upskilling and reskilling workforce in the logistics and warehousing industry, elaborates in an exclusive interview with Manufacturing Today.
Why does manufacturing need a more comprehensive skill mapping solution?
The blue-collar workers are foundational to the manufacturing sector. Skilled labour shortage is a persistent problem in the sector impacting the overall productivity and standards. The formalisation of the blue-collar workforce in India’s rising gig economy is triggering a shift towards outsourcing to meet this skilled labour deficit. However, this also means onboarding workers who are switching industries with limited knowledge about your business.
Efficient skill mapping can make this transfer easy and reduce the time taken for the worker to get productive. Building a comprehensive profile of the skills these workers have already gained, their education and training, as well as their talents and competencies, gives a more accurate measure of what they are actually capable of.
This allows firms in manufacturing to use relevant skilling programs from our in-depth course library to provide skilling that stacks atop the workers’ existing skills, in order to make them quickly productive in their new role.
21CC is consistently working towards making skill measurement more sophisticated and accurate. We are currently working in collaboration with TNO, the Netherlands Organisation for applied scientific research and some other partners from the logistics and skilling ecosystem including Olympia Nederland— a well know company offering employment solutions, to research—to better match employees and jobs basis their skills rather than diplomas and CVs.
A science-based method to measure and describe skills can make transfer of skills easy in an environment where skilled job roles are only expected to rise and many employers have to pay higher wages to counter the ill-effects of the skill gap.
How can gamified content push efficiency in production?
According to a report by Cognizant, skilled job roles are expected to grow by 3% across industries over the next five years.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) in a recent report stated the rise of machines and automation is expected to create 97 million new jobs, eliminating 85 million old ones by 2025. This tech disruption is set to compound the skill gap. As things stand, only 49.2 per cent of India’s labour force is digitally skilled currently.
For any training of the blue-collar workforce to be impactful, there is a need to develop training solutions and content that takes into account the unique behaviours, stressors and motivators for this segment. Globally the blue-collar workforce is largely low-income, with limited education and skills. They also respond differently to praise and competition as compared to their white-collar colleagues.
The recent rise of mLearning solutions by edtech and jobtech skilling platforms have proven very effective in their outreach and appeal. 21CC’s training content liberally uses gamification—which introduces game design elements into the context of non-game scenarios — to successfully increase engagement with its ability to deliver complex real-job concepts in a simplified manner. This form of simulated, active-learning increases knowledge retention from intelligently crafted modules and allows users a fail-safe virtual environment for risk-taking and developing job readiness.
How does mLearning mitigate the skill gap caused by high-speed change?
Considering that change is happening at hyper speed learning solutions must keep up to counter the resulting skill gap. Traditional models of training are no longer effective in the new scenario. Content must be crisp, relevant, industry-specific and memorable to ensure the teams hit the ground running.
It is no longer possible for businesses in manufacturing to pull teams out of circulation for a day of training. Given the employee churn, a consistently high spending on training is also not feasible. The modules need to be flexible to keep up with rapid change, and solutions must be scalable. The most effective answer that meets all of these asks is mLearning.
Evidence suggests mLearning can significantly increase the training speed and productivity of a workforce. In fact, a Merrill Lynch GoLearn initiative compared mobile learning with traditional online learning to determine the efficacy and ROI of mobile learning. And the follow up survey revealed that 99% participants, who used a smartphone, felt the mobile format supported their learning and indicated their willingness for more mobile training. More than 75 % identified the key benefits of mLearning as convenience, time saving, and no distractions.
In-house training programs could be costing more than they are delivering. Is it time to bring in the experts?
Howsoever well-designed in-house trainings may be, they can never match up to the short learning curve mLearning solutions provide. As change happens at a startling pace, responding with speed to bridge the skill gap equals survival. The skill gap, as quoted by the National Association of Manufacturer’s Outlook Survey, is the number one challenge that has been persisting over the past few years.
Another challenge L&D managers in the manufacturing industry face is that the nature of work of the blue-collar workers does not allow staff to be taken out of rotation. This means, at best the training solutions will keep getting used for already skilled teams resulting in wasted time and money.
Additionally, more research is proving that training must become more experiential and be delivered in short bites in order for it to be retained. According to Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve, 50% of new knowledge is forgotten by the next day while 90% is lost after a week. Most in-house training sessions are marathons that fail to stick, resulting in wasted man-hours. This is not the case with the mLearning solutions that we provide and the feedback from our clients is consistently positive on key parameters of retention, efficiency and job-readiness.
It makes far more productive to bring in specialists to craft and deliver industry-relevant and finely tuned course content to relevant teams. This frees up internal teams to be used more efficiently while specific content delivered through mobile apps, makes your workforce more productive without taking them off the floor. The mLearning solutions allows L&D managers to monitor progress, incentivize and keep teams motivated.
Questionmark —an online assessment provider— shares that across the world, $130 billion is spent on learning and development programs. And $97.5 billion worth of it is ineffective.
The total loss to a business from ineffective training is a staggering $13.5m per year per 1,000 employees, according to Grovo.
The follow up survey of the Merrill Lynch’s GoLearn experiment quoted above on the other hand, revealed that an estimated 4,270 hours of extra productivity were produced by providing training on mobile devices.
What stands in the way of India becoming a global manufacturing hub?
This is best answered with an example. Unarguably, data is the new ‘oil’. But while businesses rush to drill into this ‘oil’ they face a headwind; according to an Accenture and Qlik report, instead of fuelling innovation, the lack of skills in reading data is making companies lose over eight working days per employee annually. Without the needed skills, this data cannot be converted into actionable insights or fuel innovation.
In the same vein, while businesses understandably rush to adopt technologies such as AI, blockchain and robotics, it is becoming painfully clear that businesses lack the skills to implement them. Becoming a global manufacturing hub is contingent on India successfully leveraging its workforce which is its most formidable asset.
The India Skills Report 2019 states that of the 15 million candidates entering the workforce every year, almost 75% are not job ready, leading to inefficiencies and losses. The manufacturing industry is being held back by the skills gap in an already tight labour market.
What mLearning or e-learning solutions or programmes do you offer for the manufacturing sector?
21CC Education’s team of senior writers, illustrators and animators can help to create customized modules specific to businesses in the manufacturing sector, that run on the 21CC App. These can be used to map company specific processes. For instance, we have quite a comprehensive course on warehouse management that currently caters to general warehousing but can easily be adapted for the manufacturing sector. In fact, our training modules on lean warehousing, optimising space and eliminating waste are very relevant to the manufacturing sector.
The other modules relevant for this sector will be 21CC’s safety related one on fire prevention, back safety and general safety that educates users on what to do in common emergency situations.
We also develop a lot of content on soft skills like communication skills, time management and conflict resolution. A course on human factors that was designed for the airlines industry would also be relevant and can be adapted for the manufacturing sector; this covers basic human tendencies that impact efficiencies in work processes and how factors like stress, time pressure, lack of knowledge, lack of teamwork can lead to losses in the long term.
How has the learning, skilling and training landscape changed post pandemic?
For one thing, it has become tech-intense. As people management changed in the post lockdown world, all businesses across industries shifted to virtual training bringing technology to the core of all future training and development.
The eLearning industry which was already displaying a lot of potential, accelerated even more rapidly in the days following the pandemic. In 2019, the global eLearning market surpassed $200 billion in market value and many edtech companies reported more than 100% growth in 2020 alone.
Also, since social distancing is going to be observed for some time to come, mLearning, solutions will replace ILTs.
The other eLearning trends that are here to stay are micro learning, adaptive, gamification, interactive content, AR, VR, and continual learning.
What kind of learning programmes are in demand post covid?
The pandemic has exposed businesses to the need of reducing their dependence on manual labour and automate operations. This has increased demand for basis process related modules for front line employees.
Safety training modules have also been of interest. Other than that—since assembling of large groups is not possible anymore—online training has replaced instructor led training and seminars, increasing demand for modules relevant for business orientation, management trainees and sales teams. The demand for blue-collar skilling programs is highest in the industrialised states.
The pandemic has affected the e-commerce, logistics and healthcare sector differently, creating jobs and an increased demand for skilled workers. The logistics course bundle and Logistics 101 is being used by employers to rapidly on-board new employees and is helping to make them productive and job-ready quickly. Our modules on safety training have also seen a rise in demand in the last one year.
What challenges do companies face while re-skilling or training their old workforce who are used to work in certain work environment?
Traditionally, the instructor led training (ILT) that organizations undertook found resistance within the blue-collar segment. This was understandable as training days meant taking time out, and often the content delivered was lengthy, boring and eventually ineffective as it is not possible to retain all of the information delivered during a classroom training unless it is imparted in an active setting.
The resistance to mLearning skilling solutions among the workforce is low. The content is available on-demand, in an experiential format, at the user’s discretion and on a mobile devise that is now ubiquitous. The modules are in digestible bites and the AI and virtual elements keep users engaged. Apart from this, gamification allows for a sense of community and healthy competition while giving instant gratification through rewards and achieved levels. mLearning solutions can also easily navigate challenges like low literacy levels or language barriers.
The challenges faced are primarily two; connectivity and bandwidth and a lack of realization amongst business owners about the urgent need to skill, re-skill or up-skill their teams on a continual basis.