4 Steps to Ensure Successful Cannabis Training

In today’s highly competitive cannabis industry, a highly skilled and motivated workforce is essential to meet your cannabis business goals and keep your organization ahead of the competition.

Innovative and immersive training that can engage dispensary employees and effectively address the identified gaps or upskill them is critical to the organization’s success.

To support the business in this endeavor, dispensary training teams are on a constant lookout to identify and implement new techniques and trends that will help them deliver a successful cannabis industry training strategy. Selecting the right approaches that can help employees perform better are vital for the success of your learning strategy.

 

Charting Your Cannabis Industry Training Strategy

As we know, a learning strategy helps define a clear roadmap to achieve the targeted learning and performance support goals for your cannabis business. It covers the actions required to meet the specified goals and has the measures to track the performance.

While the basic tenets of what a learning strategy should outline and accomplish haven’t changed over the years, the charting of the learning strategy has certainly become more complex. For instance:

  • There has been a rapid change in the way learners want to learn (evident in the transition from traditional eLearning to mobile learning).
  • You also have the added challenge of addressing the multi-generational workforce (this requires that the adopted learning strategies should resonate well with all diverse learner profiles).
  • This is not all; there is a wide spectrum of tools and technologies that you can pick from, but these keep changing year after year. So, which ones should you pick?

As a result, even if you have a well-thought-through learning strategy, many other aspects need to be taken care of so that its implementation can deliver the required results. Selecting the right eLearning trends to refine or enhance your learning strategy will certainly go a long way in helping you succeed.

Successfully Meet Your Learning Strategy

Step 1: Where Should You Start?

One of the first things you should do is to look at the last three (3) years of eLearning trends in the cannabis industry. A quick comparison will show which trends have delivered value and impact. You will also get to see which trends were talked about but didn’t pan out.

This is a great starting point for your cannabis business, as you now have a set of trends that are certainly worth your consideration.

Step 2: How To Validate The Trend?

While several trends are delivering the required value, the next step is their suitability in the context of your cannabis business. For instance, within the mobile cannabis training solutions, there are two (2) flavors:

  1. Mobile-Friendly or Adaptive Format: These courses can be used on mobile devices, but they are not optimized for them. However, they run across the spectrum of devices learners may opt for (laptops/desktops to smartphones and tablets). The courses do not adapt dynamically to the viewable area (for instance, they would shrink in portrait mode on a smartphone). Also, the learning interactions are aligned to laptops/desktops rather than the way learners access information on smartphones.
  2. Mobile-First or Responsive Format: Here, the designs are dynamic and respond to adjust to the viewable area of each device (from laptops/desktops to smartphones and tablets). The learning interactions are optimized for mobile devices.

Which of these should you opt for, or if you are currently using the adaptive format, should you look at the responsive format? The answer lies in how the content is likely to be consumed. If your users are on the move and will pick up training predominantly on the go, you should look at the responsive design.

Otherwise, the adaptive format works. The world is abuzz with microlearning; should you move your entire training to this format? Not quite; several pieces of training would still require the format when the granularity of the microlearning format may make the learning experience rather disruptive.

This crucial process helps you validate if your needs match the selected trend. It also helps you validate which of these trends will address your requirements optimally and must be part of your learning strategy.

Step 3: Which Trends Should Be Adopted?

Look for the following five (5) aspects to ensure the success of your cannabis business’ learning strategy:

  1. Keep the learners engaged.
  2. Ensure knowledge acquisition happens.
  3. Facilitate the application of the acquired learning on the job.
  4. The desired performance gain and Return-on-Investment (or ROI) occur.
  5. A positive ROI on training spend is established.

Based on this compass, they identify which trends can help them achieve success and you can use these cues to determine which of the trends should be adopted or updated in your cannabis industry training strategy.

Step 4: Successful Implementation Of Training Strategy

Even if you researched and arrived at the right set of trends, you have validated their relevance in the context of your cannabis business; yet, successful implementation hinges on several other factors. Here are two (2) significant ones that have a direct bearing on successful outcomes:

  1. Selection Of Partners: The partners you choose (for the platform or content development): Even if you have existing partners, it may be a good idea to assess new partnerships that may be better aligned with your mandate.
  2. Internal Focus On Tracking And Checkpointing: Effective tracking and timely checkpointing of the following aspects will go a long way in the successful implementation of your learning strategy:
  • Accurate Training Needs Analysis (TNA).
  • Piloting new initiatives and using their feedback to update or refine the learning designs.
  • Change management initiatives (as you adopt radically different approaches).
  • Focus group testing (for validation of training effectiveness and impact).
  • ROI determination and using the results to fine-tune the way forward.

The process of crafting a learning strategy is a tough one, and its successful implementation is even tougher. Adopting the right trends is a significant aspect that can certainly help you succeed in this endeavor.

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