For decades, organisations big and small relied on “on-the-job” training schemes or classroom training to develop their workforce. These training strategies worked fine for organisations with a centralised workforce but for those organisations with a geographically dispersed employee base, classroom training was often too expensive to undertake or led to poor uptake due to time considerations as a result of travel.
Recently Sports Community was approached by Harness Racing Victoria’s (HRV) Manager of People and Culture, Isabella Galati, to deliver workshops on Governance and Strategic Planning using a classroom delivery model. While the training was well received, the cost of sustaining a classroom delivery model going forward would have been prohibitive for HRV. “We could see how well HRV’s training on Governance and Strategic Planning was received by the Clubs,” said Steve Pallas, Managing Director of Sports Community. “And it’s clear HRV would like to offer further development opportunities to their industry stakeholders. So, we wanted to present an alternative training model to HRV that would enable them to sustain their training into the future by making it more cost effective, yet still hitting all their training targets. ”
So together with HRV, Sports Community designed an online webinar delivery model for training and development of HRV industry stakeholders. “All you need is a device – a laptop, computer, even a phone and an internet connection and you can attend the training from anywhere, and even if you miss the training, the technology records the session so it can be viewed later,” said Steve Pallas. Using the webinar model, Sports Community plan to deliver 4 workshops to HRV industry stakeholders, including – “Increasing Raceday Attendance”, “Attracting more volunteers to clubs”, “Harnessing the power traditional media” and finally, “Harnessing the power of digital/social media”. Steve Pallas also added, “training topics are not restricted and can be customised to the needs of the organisation. We have run webinar training for councils in the remote Kimberley region on various topics.”
“At HRV we have clubs all over Victoria, filled with people that are time poor and both the distance and time are disincentives for them to participate in centralised classroom training or workshops,” said Isabella Galati. “We want a method of training and knowledge sharing where we can take it to the clubs rather than have them come to a centralised location. The webinar model is able to do that for us, so we can reach our audience in a cost-effective way, wherever they are located and provide an education path, awareness and a mechanism for them to improve in what they do.”
This organisational change in the way training is delivered that is happening at HRV and many other organisations, is not without its challenges. Including the worry that certain audience segments may not cope with the technology requirements needed to attend a webinar session, but this proved to be unfounded using the HRV experience as an example. “Our attendees had no trouble using the technology to access an online webinar,” said Isabella Galati. “So, so far, after two sessions of the four we have scheduled, we are very excited about the results and the feedback from our industry stakeholders on the webinar model has been very positive in the main. If, at the completion of the 4 scheduled webinars, our review shows that we have achieved our goals then we will certainly consider adopting this method of training going forward as it will allow us to react very quickly to development needs of our industry stakeholders in a cost-effective manner.”
For further comment on the use of technology-based training delivery models, please contact Steve Pallas at Sports Community – 03 5973 6404 stevep@sportscommunity.com.au
