Onboarding new employees used to be a very difficult task. Also known as rapid training, or on-floor orientation, it’s the practice of quickly inducting new staff into a technical job of some sort. It can be CRM work, data entry, accounting, any number of things call for this.
But, onboarding new employees was still training, and training is a pain, especially in a rush, on something complex. Memorization was the way of things for operating software and following various protocols for office work. Memorization, which is not true learning, but only rehearsing.
Learning by experience is the only way to truly absorb this sort of thing, and the only possible way to do this was to have human experts sit beside each trainee, and guide them through the tasks over and over again, until they have it mastered by practice.
Well, there’s no point in stating the obvious, regarding how impractical this was.
Well, for a very long time, there was little that could be done to resolve this obstacle. There was no effective way to create a tutorial system that could rapidly train in real time like this. With the boom of SaaS, however, this changed forever.
WalkMe is a system designed to address this problem swimmingly. Basically, it’s a macro system which integrates into web forms. It can monitor them, change focus and control them in various ways. It can also capture analytics and monitor browser states as well.
This gives it the means to guide the user, but not the logic, right? Well, it has a scriptable logic system to respond in kind with this input, so it can guide users step by step through very complex tasks, one step at a time. If they make a mistake, it points it out and corrects it. All of this is accomplished with no programming skill needed, as it’s very point and click and simple.
This is the key to handling the rapid training dilemma that people so often encounter these days. Along with being fast and applying real learning, not memorization, it also cuts some of the time expenses associated with training. Learning by doing means that it can allow for real work to be done by this new employee while they learn.
This kind of field training to this level of proficiency was impossible until WalkMe came along. To truly take in what this technology means, let’s look back at science fiction of the past twenty years.
In the future, according to these accounts, artificial intelligence lived within standard computer systems, thus making them a super user which can act on command from the user in their stead, or assist in smart automation and guidance for them.
That technology as yet does not exist, and it may be a while before anything quite that sophisticated does. WalkMe is going to be known in the history of that age as the ancestor of that technology. Just think about how it works, and the purpose it serves. It is exactly the purpose of that AI.
But, for now, this is the best thing for onboarding new employees. In fact, it’s revolutionizing a lot of industries, this just being one of them.
