SCOTTISH housebuilder Stewart Milne says it has delivered more than 1,600 hours of online training to its staff during the Covid-19 lockdown and saved around £80,000 in the process.
“What we accomplished in a three month period was quite phenomenal,” said the company’s Learning and Development Manager, Susan Hudson.
“Around 85% of employees have completed free online learning for their own personal development or mandatory health and safety training. We’ve administered 1,678 hours of training, which equates to an impressive 44 weeks.”
Eliminating commuting time, accommodation requirements and course materials have reduced the cost of remote learning over traditional training delivery, which involves delegates coming off-site and into a classroom for at least half a day.
Learners have fed back that online learning eliminates any unease of raising a hand in a silent classroom. They can also rewind and pause videos courses – which average between 35 minutes to an hour in length – to ensure they understand the content. A multiple choice test at the end helps learners check their knowledge.
“There’s been a lot of positives to come from this, from how we will deliver training going forward and the efficiencies that can be made,” Miss Hudson said.
Stewart Milne, which has more than 900 staff, worked with the Construction Industry Training Board and other housebuilders including CALA, Miller Homes and Mactaggart & Mickel to support employees with training needs during the lockdown.
This included encouraging employees to look beyond construction and consider well-being and personal development through other skills such as cooking, IT or learning a new language.
“Over the next few months, we’ll be able to compare the e-learning with face-to-face training through feedback from employees and observing behaviours onsite,” Miss Hudson said. “I’d like a bit more time before I say virtual learning is the future, but reflecting on the booking, coordinating and current feedback, online training is 100% positive.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here