The construction and manufacturing industry has a reputation for being one of the last to embrace modern technology solutions. In an industry where people’s lives (not to mention infrastructure) depend on project outcomes, adopting new methods and technologies can feel particularly daunting. But that may be changing.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, construction and manufacturing businesses are feeling more pressure than ever to tighten budgets while still managing change and risk effectively. The pandemic has worsened the already severe labor shortage of highly skilled workers in these industries.

With the complexity of the industry at an all-time high, companies are increasingly moving away from in-person training events, which are rarely frequent enough to keep up with change and demand, and sending training materials on USB through the mail, which may present a security risk. By integrating an eLearning strategy, organizations can ramp up faster, sell more effectively and generate higher returns while delivering more valuable training on products, services, and health and safety guidelines. Here are three reasons construction and manufacturing businesses should adopt a tailored customer training platform to educate their employees, customers, partners, distributors and resellers.

1. Stay Informed on Evolving Health and Safety Guidelines

To maintain successful operations, construction and manufacturing businesses, as well as their distributors and resellers, must keep up to date on relevant procedures and laws. However, the numerous different regulations for each project or machine can add up quickly, and employees can miss important health and safety codes and building regulations without regularly updated training, which makes it difficult to conduct training in-person alone.

To complicate matters further, the rapidly evolving coronavirus pandemic has guidelines changing by the hour, making eLearning a critical asset to deliver personalized training updates rapidly, allowing dealers or resellers to learn whenever and wherever it is most convenient for them.

Delivering training through a customer training platform is centralized, which enables companies to provide convenient registration, consistent and customizable branded training and learning experiences by supplying one place for materials and instruction. With access to easy-to-use, customizable tools, businesses and organizations can quickly create, deploy and scale learning programs at the local, regional or global level, allowing for better safety and more effective communication.

2. Overcome the Rising Skills Gap

In hard economic times such as the one we are in now, investing in customer training will help improve the onboarding experience of new clients, engagement of those resellers who need to be certified on products and help retain customers through difficult times.

The concept that instruction can be accessed online by watching or reading offers the scalability needed to reach everyone at once. This is particularly valuable for construction and manufacturing companies seeking new, efficient ways to overcome the rising skills gap. The technology enables companies to easily track goal progress, knowledge gains, ROI and more, and produce training reports on an overall or user-level basis, giving them clear insight into how trainees are excelling as well as areas of improvement.

3. Cost Savings

Live, in-person training and support for learners can be expensive. By shifting toward an online strategy, information can be delivered less expensively and more efficiently, lowering costs on areas such as employee travel and facilities/instructor fees and streamlining new rollouts. Businesses can provide training to numerous locations while maintaining central supervision that can easily be managed and monitored in one spot.

Whether educating employees or external channels such as resellers, partners, distributors, dealers and more (with an option to monetize training with an eCommerce integration), being able to quickly roll out educational programs to accelerate go-to-market capabilities and field a more educated workforce can have a significant impact on the business. Too often, organizations rely on shadowing, role-playing and word-of-mouth training. However, online learning can provide a more systematic approach that can continuously be monitored, evaluated and improved.

Companies in the construction and manufacturing industry are facing a climate that will only continue to grow in complexity. This rapid evolution is creating a real need for technology-driven solutions to help them do more with less. By adopting a customer training platform, companies can develop courses and learning experiences that efficiently build the knowledge, skills and abilities of their resellers and distributors all while maintaining full visibility and optimizing savings.