Until recently, Bosch, carried out their on-boarding training in the traditional way: in a classroom to a room full of people. However, they could see the value in transitioning their training to digital learning material using Skype for Business, although they were concerned that the new digital training wouldn’t be able to re-create the level of engagement their traditional one-day course had been able to generate. The following portrays what First Media did to solve that problem for Bosch...

The Main Challenge 
First Media needed to find ways to keep the attention of the participants during the webinar by keeping the content interesting. The existing PowerPoint slides included lots of small text, which didn’t translate to online learning: the amount of text on screen would have caused the participants to disengage with the training. Fearing that people would switch off and start looking at their mobile phones instead, the wordy slides were updated to feature eye-catching graphics with less text.

Staying Focused
In traditional face-to-face training, a presenter usually stands in front of the group to focus on, but with a webinar you only have the voice of the presenter talking and the PowerPoint slides themselves. Therefore, we made sure that they included lots of graphics and bright colors, and that the slides were constantly changing. This strategy helped to maintain the users’ attention, while also managing to get across the important messages.

Keeping Participants Engaged 
First Media were also keen to make the webinar as interactive as possible, so they embraced the annotation function in Skype for Business to create a quiz in which the participants can click on an answer to reveal the question. This activity, along with others, and videos made the content engaging throughout.

Designing a Pre-Pack
Over the years Bosch had developed a strong face-to-face induction for their new employees, with some nice tasks that were difficult to transfer to a webinar. One of these involved a new employee finding out three facts about each of the other participants and then sharing them with the group. We liked this icebreaker and didn’t want to lose it, so we put together an offline pre-pack that included a section for the participants to prepare their own introductions.

What Bosch told First Media
Amelie Bestek, part of Human Resources development at Bosch UK, was delighted with the transition of the training materials online. She explained, "We used our new webinar in March 2020, and the interactive induction went down really well with our new starters! Thank you for your innovative ideas and suggestions, First Media!"

While the world is coming to terms with the effects of coronavirus, First Media are inviting organisations to contact them and find out how they can help move the client’s training online.