The concept of participatory learning interests me the most because of current training and development needs at the healthcare workplace. Executives are on opposite sides of the fishbowl when it comes to training needs. Meaning, they all agree that a pharmacy staff needs training and company engagement to motivate the team members for employee retention but also more importantly performance improvement, so their patients are cared for properly.

Half of the team believes in application training. The old routes of “show and go” training from a hired trainer. The other half want to make moves more to virtual training and approaches that I am now coming to understand is the participatory training. Where the learner (team member) is gaining knowledge through the work environment, buddy systems and training sessions where they are active in self-discovery or self-teaching amongst newly hired peers.

The debate continues as such:

With a hired boots to the ground trainer, the team members has an person from a company agency to depend on for the absolute correct answers methods to software and workflow questions. They are able to provide live support to train the physical process and performance expectation and at the moment trouble shooting of issue that occurs prior to passing the trainee to their team members/ managers for their continual learning.

With virtual trainer, you can have the same instant support, but it is provided with a more independent thought process. The trainer is now expected to guide the team member to answer rather than providing the answer upfront. This approach has proven for fast cognitive retention so in return, the information sticks quicker, thus the team members preforms better. All operational training and performance then is the responsibility of the manager of their team.

So, the question then becomes, can we successfully train our team members and fulfill their support needs virtually with participatory learning so they can preform accurately and efficiently? How will we do this.

Researching this, there is not much advice on how to provide participatory virtual learning for workplaces outside of office settings. There is very little written for retail, warehouse, or pharmacy training. One thing that comes up from time to time is simulation training. This type of particaptory training was limited to clinical training. But according to the pharmacy journal, simulation training was introduced to the pharmacy world as early as 2018 (https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/research/simulation-based-training-applications-in-clinical-pharmacy) At the time the simulation training was limited to the UK, but in 2019 Walmart introduced simulation training to their employees. (https://www.benefitnews.com/news/walmart-bets-on-simulation-video-game-for-employee-training) CVS has even joined the future of participatory training and use the simulation methods in their hiring process. They use simulation scenarios to provide the potential team member a real live work experience so they can both access the potential team member but also provide them with scenarios that they can decide before hire if the work environment is the right fit for them.

So maybe virtual participatory training for an application based workplace is feasible after all.