In case you missed it: the New York Times' profile of Mindflash last week showed how one company — DBS Financial of Akron, Ohio, an auto loan provider with 30 employees — is turning to online training courses not just to streamline the process but to upgrade the quality and effectiveness of the training itself.
Sam Snellenberger of DBS explained the constant predicament he faced: “We’d show videos, or have people come in to do classroom training, but it was a huge pain. We’d have to cycle in employees in three different groups to make sure there was adequate customer coverage, and by the time we were through it took up most of a day. You could see people’s minds wandering during the presentations. And then supervisors would have to work with individual employees to make sure everyone understood everything.”
So DBS recently signed up with Mindflash to ease their training headaches by allowing employees to take online courses on their own time and at their own pace. Result: “Everyone does the training now at different times, whenever it’s easiest to free the time up,” says Snellenberger. “We know everyone’s getting through the material, and we can see who’s having trouble with the questions so we can follow up with them.”
Check out the entire story — and try out a course yourself. In the post, New York Times reporter David Freedman put together a micro-course on brewing beer at home, complete with quizzes, and also linked to a more extensive demo about training new hires that the Mindflash team put together for his post.
> More about employee training and retention on the Mindflash blog.