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Construction is facing a labor shortage—and they aren’t the only ones. A shortfall of skilled workers is impacting businesses across the AEC&M industries, and elearning is a critical piece of the solution.
As an industry, construction has been slower to embrace digital transformation. While there’s no denying that digitization is a challenge all on its own, it’s also clear that plenty of digital tools were not designed with the unique needs of the construction industry in mind—and a tool that doesn’t fit its users’ context can quickly become a stumbling block.
The hurdles to training in the construction industry are varied. Learning often happens on the job and in the field. In many cases, it incorporates multiple layers of specialized information: safety procedures, regulatory compliance, or even customized project-specific processes. Documentation of classes and certifications is crucial.
The right LMS for your construction business doesn’t just have good information—it meets your employees where they need it most. If you’re evaluating your elearning options, here are four key features to keep in mind.
One of the biggest challenges to effective training in any industry, but particularly in construction, is time. It’s difficult to find the hours to spend on quality learning, particularly when rising demand is steadily creating more pressing work.
Employees in construction also face the need to potentially come in from the field, and to do their training away from the situations and tools where it’s most applicable. Many also already have experience with the subject matter, and risk having to retread material they already know.
Skill assessments and personalized learning paths help workers avoid wasting time on lessons they’ve already mastered, letting them focus on precisely the content they need. Shorter, more targeted lessons also improve retention. Pair them with the ability to access course content from anywhere, and workers can start to apply what they’ve learned right away, cementing the new information for the future.
This kind of flexibility also helps you streamline hiring and onboarding, both high-priority tasks during a skilled labor shortage. Skill assessments give you a straightforward way to identify talented new hires, and that same information can customize their onboarding process and initial training, getting them up to speed as quickly as possible.
The construction technology ecosystem is only growing more sophisticated, and both new hires and current workers will need to stay on top of the latest developments. That’s true at every level of the construction process, whether managing the project in Procore, modeling a building in Revit, or designing individual components in SolidWorks.
A construction-oriented LMS won’t just offer the right content libraries—it will ensure they are regularly updated to reflect the most current information and the latest software versions, so that your employees’ skills don’t fall out of step. Also important is the ability to customize established course libraries, to match your company’s use cases and policies.
With health and safety at stake, it makes sense that construction is a tightly regulated industry. Compliance often requires regular recertification or training, updated materials when regulations change, and retaining proof of courses or certifications.
Construction firms need an LMS that can track and provide historical user data, covering which users have completed which courses and when, and that can store and retrieve certifications for easy access. The right LMS can collect all the training data you need to ensure that you’re meeting your regulatory obligations.
That same user data can also provide a wealth of insight into your workforce, giving you the tools to assess skill gaps and create targeted training or hiring initiatives. You can also leverage it to better understand your employees’ utilization of your LMS and invest attention in the resources they use most, whether that’s certification courses, reference materials, safety trainings, or another learning opportunity entirely.
There’s a great deal of specialized knowledge in construction that often winds up living solely in employees’ brains. At best, this situation can create bottlenecks when multiple other employees or teams need to consult the expert employee. At worst, it can grind business to a halt if the employee leaves the organization.
A robust LMS gives you a place to store hard-earned expertise and institutional knowledge so that it’s accessible to all employees, current and future. This single source of truth makes operations more efficient for both the workers seeking information and the worker who’s no longer being interrupted to provide it.
You can also leverage a full-featured LMS to establish standard operating procedures and workflows. This way, workers have a reference for complex or lengthy processes—one they can access whenever and wherever they need it.
We designed our software from the ground up specifically to address the needs of the AEC&M industries. At a time when workers with the right skills are difficult to find, our KnowledgeSmart skill assessments can help you identify the talent to grow your business. Our course libraries cover the top construction software titles in depth, and the course content and workflows can be customized to suit your specific training needs.
To learn more about how Pinnacle Series is enhancing elearning in the construction industry, or to see a full demonstration of our software, contact us today.
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