Interactive quizzes to create and improve employee training courses

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The most decorated, qualified, and experienced new employees starting at your company still need to learn your business’s way of doing things.

They need to learn and understand your brand’s way of communicating internally and externally, they need to learn how decisions are made, and a whole host of other proprietary information, work systems, and how they all intertwine.

On top of that, upskilling and promoting from within presents its own set of challenges.

Traditionally, this can look like variations of the following:

• In-house trainers: Employees who spend a significant portion of their job training and upskilling staff, delivering one-to-one coaching and group sessions.
• The buddy system: Where new employees work side-by-side with an experienced or ideal employee over their first few shifts or weeks to learn the ropes.
• Initial training periods: Some large organisations will onboard, train, or upskill groups of employees at a time, almost like a class.

While sometimes, and for some jobs, this approach can be unavoidable, they all suffer similar pitfalls. They’re all quite labour intensive. You can find that you have two people doing the work of one person for a period of time. You can literally have multiple employees studying and not working.

This article isn’t about axing all of the classic corporate training methods – but rather adding digital tools to complement them, and allowing you to achieve better results training your team while using less resources. This is where the employee training quiz comes in.

Benefits of using interactive quizzes in employee training

In this context, training quizzes are interactive digital experiences that can be participated in on any modern device. This means they’re effective whether your workplace is a physical site or remote. They generate data points for every user action, and allow for autonomous learning.

This is a learning solution that’s not labour intensive. Once the training quiz is made and approved, until it needs to be updated or improved, it’s good to go. This way you can ensure employees understand important information while maintaining a higher overall level of productivity.

Improved knowledge retention and skill acquisition

It’s well established that being lectured for two to three hours over video conferencing software isn’t terribly effective. That’s just not how most people learn.

What is shown to be effective, is when there’s an interactive element, such as when learners get to interact with the ideas they’re studying. This is where the question and answer format of the interactive quiz can really pay dividends and complement other elements of training programmes.

For example, you could customise a number of short quizzes on an enterprise-grade quiz builder like the Drimify gamification platform, tailoring the questions, answers, and intermediate content screens to complement a specific facet of what they’ve been learning about on a given day. This way they’re using what they’ve learned to answer the questions immediately, encouraging knowledge acquisition and retention.

Enhanced engagement and motivation

It’s also just more motivating to “do” rather than be shown or instructed. Again being lectured, or having your hand held through a process can be quite a passive experience for new employees.

Interactive quizzes for employee training can also trigger reward systems. Because the question and answer formats on a quiz are either right or wrong, participants can earn points, and generate a score. With Drimify’s quiz template you can customise the end screen employees will see based on their score percentage, and you can even enable the leaderboard option to create competition among learners.

This could form the basis of an entire employee upskilling programme, as you could use Drimify’s experience builder – the Dynamic Path™ – to create a series of quizzes and content screens that make up an employee learning journey. This could be for upskilling in a specific area of your business, and a global leaderboard could be enabled to aggregate employee scores across the experience – sustaining their motivation as they work their hardest to climb the leaderboard.

Real-time feedback for immediate improvement

Every user action on a Drimify quiz creates data. This means you can see through your dashboard how your employees are performing, and where they’re struggling.

In more traditional corporate training structures, it can sometimes only become apparent in live scenarios that an employee doesn’t understand X, Y, or Z, whereas using interactive quizzes as part of training can help identify additional requirements much earlier.

The ability to simulate job-specific scenarios in a safe learning environment

This leads to perhaps the most powerful advantage of online quizzes: the ability to simulate realistic on-the-job problems in a low-stakes environment.

On an enterprise-grade quiz builder, you can use videos and text to pose vivid, highly specific scenarios, and invite your employees to apply their learning.

Because it’s a scenario, rather than an actual event, they’re free to fail and learn from their failure.

This is especially effective for developing soft skills, helping employees understand decision making frameworks, and for upskilling management.

Key features of effective employee training quizzes

Of course, you can’t just throw a few questions and answers together and release your quiz to your employees. You’re not quizzing for the fun of it, with trivia and general knowledge, or just asking questions for the sake of asking questions.

Your implementation needs to be highly strategic. Every question and every answer needs to work towards your desired learning outcomes.

Every organisation and every training programme is different, but as a general rule, the best training courses adhere to the following best practices

They’re implemented in the employee learning journey at the optimum time

By which we mean they’re designed to create interaction around previously discussed topics. If they build upon a subject and add more context or information through intermediate screens, it’s done gently.

Quiz difficulty is tailored to the required knowledge or skill level

Your client-facing employee may need to understand a decision-making framework, but they don’t need to know why that particular decision-making framework was chosen as opposed to another.

While it’s useful to educate employees about the challenges other teams they work with can face, they only need to know so much as to avoid blindspots and miscommunications. Understanding the challenges of another department is not the same as being able to fill in for employees in that department.

They’re an appropriate vehicle for the learning requirements

The interactive quiz is a highly versatile format and can be used to support almost any training programme, but in some cases, it shouldn’t be relied on exclusively.

For an OTT example, you could use interactive quizzes to support an employee’s learning about a particularly expensive and potentially dangerous piece of equipment, but it’s an aid, and not a substitute for practice time with a qualified operator.

Take employee training to the next level with interactive quizzes

Including interactive training quizzes in your employee training programmes can dramatically improve performance for knowledge retention and skill acquisition, identify learning requirements early, and allow for less labour intensive, more productive upskilling and onboarding. For even smoother candidate journeys (and more effective hiring) you could even use variations of the quizzes as skills assessments in recruitment.

They can form entire autonomous upskilling programmes when combined into gamified experiences, or be used on a more granular level to complement more traditional training approaches.

It all comes down to knowing what you need, and executing them tactically and thoughtfully.

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