Over the past three years, there has been no shortage of articles, reports, and posts about how the pandemic has permanently altered the corporate learning environment. In the first year or so, everything was certainly turned upside down. For those organizations that operate in an extended enterprise environment, this was especially true. Companies like auto manufacturers had to figure out how to keep up the skills of a dispersed network of dealerships comprised of employees that are not actually their employees.
In 2021, Brandon Hall Group Smartchoice® Silver Preferred Provider Latitude Learning conducted a series of interviews with these kinds of organizations to see how they were responding to the pandemic. Some of the key takeaways at the time were:
- Large organizations can turn on a dime. Most of these companies were able to adapt and adjust and find alternatives to in-person training rather quickly
- Trainers want to train. The people responsible for delivering the training could not be stopped. They found ways to make it work.
- Virtual meetings took over. Meeting platforms were the go-to solution for most companies in the early days. It was clunky at first, but most saw their approach evolve over time.
- There is no replacement for hands-on training. There are just some skills that are best delivered hands-on, especially in a heavy equipment or automotive environment.
Now, two years after those interviews, we have seen training in the extended enterprise quietly shift back to the way it was pre-pandemic. Not quite completely, but the idea that there was no going “back to normal” has definitely been dispelled. The need for hands-on training remains, and there has been a steady shift back to the classroom. This is not inherently a bad thing but is not quite what most people were predicting.
To explore these dynamics a bit more closely, Latitude Learning is partnering with Brandon Hall Group to deliver a webinar that looks at where extended enterprise training is now and how we got here.
