Table of Contents
Introduction
As distributed workforces become the norm for most global corporate businesses, the need for multilingual e-learning becomes more and more apparent. The Global Corporate E-Learning Market Research Report 2024 by Valuates Reports observed the value of the global corporate e-learning market to be more than 22.15 billion dollars in 2023. It also predicted it to reach a value of more than 51.26 billion dollars by 2030, with a CAGR of 12.6% during the forecast period 2024-2030.
While most of this e-learning is provided in one of the most used languages in corporate offices, the top one being English, this is no longer a sustainable practice. The global workforce has become more diverse and demands inclusivity and accessibility to learning resources in their native languages. In fact, it is more economical and time-saving to provide multilingual e-learning content than to train employees in your default workplace language. A digital adoption platform like Assima that has built-in multilingual capabilities is perfect for streamlining this process.
Delve into our innovative multilingual functionalities in greater detail here.
Why Multilingual E-Learning Matters for Global Enterprises
In an age when multilingual e-learning is becoming the norm, some of the things you must consider are:
Growing Global Operations Bases
As the economy inflates, multinational corporations expand their bases while nationally operated businesses spread their roots to other countries. Even nationally operated companies look for employees across borders for access to a bigger talent pool that improves productivity and retention. In any case, the need for global workforce training comes to the forefront. Besides characteristics like scalability and centralized content delivery, localized employee training also becomes a necessity in global training networks. It makes more sense to provide training in the required native languages than to provide every native-speaker employee with training in a single standard language as we mentioned before.
This is because language training is a drawn-out process that will eat into productive working hours to complete. Hiring native speaking instructors or buying systems training for every required language is also a major investment without a justifiable ROI. However, if you simply use an intelligent translation engine to convert all training materials in one language to all others required, you can train all your employees within the training schedule at the same time with minimal expenses and a significant payoff.
Challenges of Multilingual E-Learning
As important as multilingual training is and as simple as it sounds, it comes with certain challenges that must be overcome with the right multilingual e-learning solutions and strategies. These hurdles include:
Language Barriers:
Creating multilingual training is not just about literal translations of the learning materials. Every language has cultural nuances, subtleties, and taboos that must be observed. Contextual translation is still a weakness of most automated translation solutions.
Inconsistent Training:
If your training materials are static and depend greatly on local instructors to present to learners, you have another issue to deal with. Different instructors may have different levels of understanding for the topic as well as teaching expertise, making training quality inconsistent.
Heterogenous Delivery:
Depending on how common and easy a language is, the time to translate training materials and review them can vary from one to the other. As a result, trainees in different parts of the world could end up receiving and starting training at different times, resulting in inconsistencies.
Constant Updations:
If the software or system that employees need to be trained in sees frequent upgrades, the training materials will need regular updates too. Multiply that with all the languages you need to train your entire workforce in, and it significantly increases the burden of the content creators to keep up.
Importance of Inclusivity and Accessibility in Employee Development
At an age where the necessity for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity (DEI) is being debated across the world, one thing is clear – organizations with a distributed or remote workforce cannot afford to ignore multilingual e-learning. The risks of monolingual training are:
- Benefits only a small section of the workforce and inconveniences the rest
- Polarizes your staff based on linguistic provisions of training by your company
- Creates workplace dissatisfaction, disengagement, and even resentment
- Lowers productivity due to miscommunications and gaps in knowledge
- Creates compliance and data security risks due to language barriers
- Increases the burden on support staff due to increased helpdesk calls
- Raises employee turnover, reduces retention, and restricts talent attraction
- Tarnishes your reputation as a thoughtful, inclusive working place
Taking into consideration all these repercussions, the pros of multilingual training are many and will benefit you in the long run.
Benefits of Multilingual E-Learning
Multilingual digital learning has the potential to become the bedrock of enterprise training not just for companies offering remote work but also for on-site jobs held by people whose native language is not the default company language.
Enhanced Employee Engagement
Every person is comfortable in the language they have used the most in life, which is almost always their native language. Learning in the language you are most well-versed in allows you to understand better and hence, engage more with your job. This creates a culture where employees work enthusiastically and out of a sense of responsibility instead of simply going through the motions while struggling to make sense of the instructions.
Better Knowledge Retention
Learning in one’s native language has the greatest impact on knowledge retention and recall. This is because the employee understands the material completely and gains a better grasp of how to do their job. They will need less assistance during onboarding and working on the live system and will be less likely to make mistakes. Learning in a different language usually introduces gaps in understanding and misinterpretations that learning in your native language resolves.
Consistent Global Training Standards
When every employee learns in the language they are most adept in, training is bound to be more consistent. With contextually accurate translations, you can ensure that the standard of training is maintained across all your office locations. It would also be in compliance with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity) policies that require employees to be trained in their native language for maximum effectiveness and a streamlined onboarding process.
Faster Software Adoption
Perhaps one of the most noticeable benefits of multilingual training is the faster and smoother digital adoption of new tools and technologies introduced in the workplace. Every employee is scared of change and prefers the status quo, but as technology advances, workplaces must keep up. One highly effective way to get over employee fear and resistance to new technology is to train them in their native language for clearer understanding.
Delve deeper into the evolution of simulations and how they have improved onboarding processes.
Calculating the ROI of Multilingual E-Learning
The ROI of multilingual e-learning comes in the form of both measurable metrics and invisible value. Let us look at some of these variables:
Reduced Costs
Multilingual e-learning saves you a significant amount by bypassing the need for language learning, arranging for separate training platforms, or recreating every lesson in multiple languages manually. By having one platform that allows lessons to be delivered in multiple languages, you generate fewer redundancies and save more.
Increased Productivity
Homogenous multilingual digital training across the workforce allows onboarding to go faster and smoother and reduces the steep adoption curve for software used by the company. This reduces the time-to-productivity of employees and ensures that the workforce as a whole reaches peak productivity more easily.
Decreased Support Requests
With multilingual e-learning, you reduce the chances of misunderstandings or compliance breaches in the workflows and operations of the business. This reduces the burden on IT, helpdesk, and other support staff. Productive work hours of both employees and support teams are increased as a result.
Boost in Business Growth
When your employees know exactly what to do in any business situation because they understand the training materials thoroughly, they can be instrumental in driving operational success and optimizing business processes. When this happens across the workforce, you notice significantly boosted business growth.
Higher Employee Retention
Enterprise multilingual learning also has a positive effect on employee retention. One of the biggest costs for any business is replacing an employee who leaves the company. Multilingual training is one of the ways you can be sensitive to the needs of your employees and cater to their linguistic preferences, reducing turnover.
Calculate the ROI and savings you generate by using Assima.
Implementing a Multilingual E-Learning Strategy
Multilingual e-learning can be a blessing for training distributed workforces, but only when implemented with the right strategies and practices. Keep the following in mind when designing the multilingual training program for your enterprise:
Assess Global Training Needs
One important thing to always keep in mind is that if your company needs multilingual training, it is because they have a distributed workforce. Thus, you will be designing training for different teams in different locations with different goals and priorities. These must be kept in mind along with the varying linguistic needs.
Choose the Right Learning Platform
When choosing a systems training platform with multilingual capabilities, make sure that it has facilities for all the languages that you need training in. Not every platform has provisions for every language. The best way to remain on the safe side is to confirm that you are getting access to all the languages that your company needs.
Develop Culturally Relevant Materials
There is a difference between straightforward translation and contextual localization. Every language and location have cultural nuances that must be considered when creating lessons in that language or translating existing lessons to it. If you don’t, misinterpretations are bound to happen, and not always of the funny kind.
Regularly Maintain and Update Content
Training materials must be maintained and updated with consistency as processes and systems in the company are modified and upgraded. When dealing with multilingual training, the same must be ensured for lessons in every language that you provide training in to maintain their relevance and accuracy in regard to the company and industry.
How Assima Train Supports Multilingual E-Learning Success
Assima Train multilingual features are created with the aim of making global multilingual training better, smarter, and faster. Here’s how:
Interactive Simulations Across Languages
Assima Train already makes training more effective using fully interactive, hyper-realistic simulations that ensure an immersive, hands-on learning experience. However, the real magic lies in the fact that these simulations can be made available in any supported language, and the translated aspects stretch from the interface to the data to the instructions, without the need to re-record them manually.
In-App Multilingual Guidance
Assima In-App Search is a subsidiary tool that sits as a widget-like search tool overlaying live applications to provide real-time, role-based, contextual support to employees working on the live system. It improves employee experience, boosts confidence, and reduces errors. Most importantly, it gives them access to all multilingual content in one place.
Scalable and Consistent
Multilingual e-learning can only be successfully deployed on scalable employee training solutions. The reason is that most companies opting for multilingual training are those that employ a remote workforce and need a platform whose functionalities can be scaled accordingly. Assima ensures a consistently high-quality learning experience for employees across the globe.
Centralized Content Management
Assima lessons can all be accessed from a central learning portal. Hence, lessons in every language, once uploaded or published, can be accessed by any authorized user in any corner of the world. This allows companies to deliver lessons in all languages at the same time, irrespective of time zone or location, allowing consistent training throughout..
Easy Lesson Updates from a Single Source
Once a lesson has been created, you can translate it into as many permitted languages as you want from the same recording without any need to recapture them. When the system changes, any modification made to the lesson is reflected in every language version of the lesson so that you do not have to apply it to each version individually.
Case Study: How Assima Helped a Non-Profit Organization Streamline Multilingual Global Training
Systems Integration Project (SIP) was one of first and most ambitious SAP migration projects undertaken by Plan International to replace three of their legacy systems – their finance system, Grants Tracking System (GTS), and Projects and Program Module (PPM). Since these were deployed locally at 275 locations in 53 countries worldwide, they needed quality SAP multilingual training to onboard all their employees.
With Assima, they were able to provide highly interactive, hands-on training to their staff, which was delivered and implemented in record time while achieving excellent cost savings and consistency. Training was made available in all the necessary languages, including English, Spanish, and French, without extra expenses or effort. Even for a platform with a steep learning curve like SAP, Assima made it smooth and easy. You can read all about it here.
Conclusion
As more and more enterprises realize the advantages of maintaining distributed workforces, they also face the need to implement multilingual e-learning for employees from different parts of the world. With a solution like Assima, you can empower your global workforce while saving time, resources, and manpower. Our pioneering 4X patented technology will help you go all the way.
Tons of enterprises have experienced the Assima advantage. Now, it is time for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Let’s Answer Some of Your Questions.
Global enterprises maintain a global workforce, and the staff at every location have their own language or set of languages they are comfortable with. Catering to an employee’s language preferences during training results in higher productivity, engagement, and retention. This makes multilingual e-learning a must for global enterprises.
Multilingual employee training boosts employee engagement, knowledge retention, user adoption, and training homogeneity. As a result, business growth, ROI, and efficiency improve greatly.
Multilingual e-learning saves training and onboarding costs, helps in increasing employee productivity, reduces the number of helpdesk calls, and creates an invested workforce. All these factors result in a boost in ROI.
Assima, in all its digital products and services, incorporates multilingual functionalities that allow L&D to make every lesson available in any supported language to the entire workforce. There is no need to recapture every lesson every time a new language requirement arises. Translation is a one-step process that incorporates multilingual facilities as an integral part of the platform.
When implementing multilingual training programs, consider the needs of employees in every location, be sensitive to cultural elements in the lessons, use a scalable training solution, and maintain the same level of quality and delivery consistency for lessons.
