The construction industry continues to adopt new technologies at a rapid rate in the era of COVID-19 in an ongoing effort to increase productivity and reduce costs, all while keeping workers safe and healthy. To help with the adoption of new technologies for field and office crews and at the same time reducing exposure to COVID, innovations for virtually training software users have increased in usage. This article covers the ins and outs of self-guided interactive training which provides workers the platform to learn individually at their own pace rather than in large groups.
There are many advantages to self-guided training courses and systems. With busy work schedules, differing tasks and varying priorities, getting large groups together is often quite difficult. Additionally, not everyone learns at the same speed, nor do they speak up when they lack understand of what is being taught due to social pressure.
Self-guided interactive training software facilitates an environment for individuals to learn at their own pace, on their own schedule. Often workers in the construction industry will complete long, arduous training sessions where most of the material is new or irrelevant to their current scope. Retention rates are low in these types of scenarios, as people tend to only focus on what they need to get out of the training – what pertains most to their current workflow. When asked to perform a new, different task, even though it was covered in the training, they wont remember how, as they have only seen it in the training once before.
As interactive training is always available, right at their fingertips, workers can easily learn anything, can accomplish anything, right before, or while actually performing the task. This leads to far better retention and less retraining. Additionally, lessons can be done in stages and focused on specific tasks. Interactive training can be repeated multiple times as well, which provides refreshers when needed.
Studies show that in general, people learn through actually doing the task versus listening or reading. As self-guided interactive training requires users to take action and do the work within the software program to complete their learning, retention of the information is much higher than traditional methods.
Intelliwave Technologies has recently integrated a self-guided interactive training program into their SiteSense® Materials Management software. As the self-guided training tool is available right within SiteSense®, there is no need to log into a separate system.
The self-guided training tool makes it easy for users in training to see exactly what action needs to be taken. To highlight specific buttons or sections of the website, the SiteSense® interactive training tool darkens out the rest of the website, highlighting the area of focus so that the trainee can easily see exactly where to look.
The interactive training tool highlights certain system functions to provide contextual information and the user can cycle through them via the “Next” button once they are ready to move to the next step. Other steps require the user to execute functions in SiteSense®, where once again, the actions are very clear and easy to follow.
General information pop-ups are also available to explain to the user what will happen next, and provide further details if needed.
How we work, learn, and interact with each other is rapidly changing due to the COVID era. Intelliwave Technologies is continually driving the digitization of the construction industry forward and implementing the latest technological innovations to help construction projects continually improve productivity. Contact Intelliwave Technologies today to learn more how SiteSense can digitize Materials Management for your projects.