Covid 19 Pandemic and Training & Development

 


Introduction

Covid 19 pandemic is the most significant health issue faced by the world during this century (International Labour Organization, 2021). Covid 19 pandemic due to coronavirus has begun in early 2020 and badly impacted basically economy and society including health services, the economy, the education, employment, agriculture, tourism, training and development, and every sector. The government has declared a curfew, lockdowns, and other rules and regulations to avoid the high spread of the coronavirus and the high mortality rate. Because of this, style of the life and employment have drastically changed.

The implication of COVID 19 to Employment


The COVID-19 pandemic has affected economies and societies all around the world and affected a fall in economic activities, lost working hours and employment income, and an increase in unemployment and underemployment (International Labour Organization, 2021). Further due to the continuous lockdowns and social distance regulations, organizations have implemented a limited number of employees physically coming to workplaces, and sometimes working hours per week reduce to a few hours (Asian Development Bank, 2021). Working from home concept also rises significantly. Further, young workers are also badly affected since they are not given opportunities by employers and they want to retain and limit existing employees rather than offering new job opportunities.

The implication of COVID 19 to Training and Development


Simplilearn (2022) explains that the beginning of the COVID-19 global health crisis disturbed work patterns in organizations worldwide and another most affected area is employee learning and development. Because the sudden requirement to move employees to work from home has made it impossible to provide physical and classroom-based skills training.

Due to this crisis, the importance of online training has increased. Online training or learning can easily give many things to many people. It essentially is different from a physical gathering in the classroom or a place to learn or train. Online learning or training can be considered one mode of distance learning. There can be distance learning with the use of a Learning Management System (LMS) with much less interaction with the learners. While the intention of reaching out to the learners remains the same, the intensity of involvement of both the teacher and the learner significantly differs in both cases (Dharmasiri, 2021).

As per the survey has conducted by Simplilearn (2022), key findings can be explained how covid 19 pandemic resulted in training and development as follows:

•           Skills training had been a priority for companies before COVID-19.

93% of respondents said that their companies provided skills training to their employees before the pandemic.

•           Classroom training had been provided before COVID 19 pandemic.

70% of respondents said that their training programs were either classroom-only or a combination of classroom and online components.

•           Classroom physical programs have changed online. 

86% of respondents said that the organizations that offered physical classroom skills training to their employees prior to the pandemic have moved to online methods.

•           Online programs are equally or more effective than in-person classroom training.

82% of respondents said that classroom programs and online programs are equally effective and 13% said online training is more effective than classroom training.

•           Online training doesn’t have to mean online-only.

56% of respondents who use online training include a live online classroom component.  Only 44% use self-paced video courses with no live component.

 

Conclusion

Training and development are key success factors in the organization and during and post the COVID 19 pandemic, it is very much essential to continue the training and development in the organizations. Due to the practical difficulty arising from working from home and social distance, the importance of online training and development has increased. More often, webinars, live learning sessions, videos, and social learning types are used as a method of online training or learning. The popularity of e-learning as a teaching method has grown by offering ready-made courses and modules (Mikołajczyk, 2021). After the pandemic, most organizations conduct highbred training methods of physically gathering and using online platforms. Due to the more competitiveness and new knowledge and technology, internal face-to-face training will not be conducted frequently compared to pre covid and a combination of physical and digital might be a good approach in the future.

References

Asian Development Bank (2021) ADB BRIEFS: COVID-19 Impact on Technical

and Vocational Education and Training in Sri Lanka. Available at: https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/683046/adb-brief-168-covid-19-impact-tvet-training-sri-lanka.pdf (Accessed: 01 May 2022)

Dharmasiri, A. (2021) Promising Prospects of Learning in the Post-COVID-19 Era Sri Lanka, Journal of Training and Development, 1(1). Available at: https://www.slitad.org.lk/storage/downloads/SLJT&D%20Volume%201.pdf (Accessed: 30 April 2022)

International Labour Organization (2021) Skills development in the time of COVID-19: Taking stock of the initial responses in technical and vocational education and training. Geneva: International Labour Office. Available at:   https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/---ifp_skills/documents/publication/wcms_776788.pdf (Accessed: 30 April 2022)

Mikołajczyk, K. (2021), "Changes in the approach to employee development in organisations as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic", European Journal of Training and Development, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJTD-12-2020-0171

Simplilearn (2022) How COVID-19 Has Affected Employee Skills Training: A Simplilearn Survey. Available at: https://www.simplilearn.com/how-covid-19-has-affected-employee-skills-training-article (Accessed: 30 April 2022)

Comments

  1. Rohitha Samarathunge4 May 2022 at 10:54

    The economic, political and finally technological environment has changed in recent years significantly both on a national and international scale. The most significant challenges affecting current developments include the economic surroundings, explicitly, globalization, knowledge economy, demographic changes and the last pandemic Covid-19 crisis.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sampathJ7 May 2022 at 04:32

    COVID-19 is changing the way employees learn and work across the world. With more and more organizations shifting to remote working, remote training, newer learning tools are being adopted to sustain learning during the pandemic. So much has evolved in the L&D space since the beginning of the outbreak that learning and development professionals have had to abruptly adapt to frequently changing circumstances. This has required measures such as canceling of face-to-face events, digitizing of training, and more. With remote working becoming the new normal in today’s pandemic-hit world, virtual training for remote workers is going to see a sharp upward trend in the future. Embracing this new virtual training approach that focuses on reconstituting the content delivery approach and adjusting the standards for learning goals will only lead to a rise in virtual training investment across the board.

    ReplyDelete

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