It’s not always easy to ensure that each employee has the education and tools necessary to successfully begin their new job. There are schedules to consider, materials to create and strategic initiatives that cannot be ignored by your organization. With so many competing initiatives, it would take a training team to meet the needs of the organization. Unfortunately, most casinos employ one or two training professionals to support the entire casino’s training initiatives and professional development programs. The question becomes, “How do we do more with less?”

The training department is not the only department feeling the budgetary pinch! Since the economy declined in 2008, most casinos are careful with their financial resources. Some casinos wish to hire, but we all know how difficult it can be to find, train, and most importantly, retain good candidates with limited resources. So how do you protect the investment you’ve made in your employees?

The best option may be leveraging technology. Consider the automation on the casino floor with ATMs and TITO machines, and how they have alleviated long lines for customer service during busy times, or the integration of automated slot jackpot processing and the streamlining of guest service. Technology can enhance your operation if partnered with the right vendor, particularly when it comes to training and compliance.

With the right partner, the deployment of training content can provide employees with the necessary educational tools they need to do their job, and enhance their knowledge for future opportunities within your organization, while working within the property’s budget and staffing limitations. The goal is to enhance the learning process to ensure that each employee has information to do their job effectively and hit the floor running with success. Successful training program processes naturally lead to greater employee retention since goals, expectations and objectives are no longer a secret!

Ever feel like you have 100 initiatives that are all competing for your attention? I do, and I’m sure you do too! And, I love when I can partner with a technology partner that assists with best practices and creative ideas that I may not have considered in my organization. The cost to create professional development content can be astronomical and may not be financially feasible, considering you may need a content writer, designer, facilitator and supervisor to manage the team.

Imagine picking from a library of tailored training courses specific to our industry, focusing on select competencies that become the building blocks of a great program. It is easier to use meaningful content that is already created and that can be molded, crafted and inserted into a program, than to create it from nothing. The cost for buying access to digitally created training content that is specific to casinos is minimal compared to hiring a content design team and the time it takes to create the materials. This will allow your training team to focus on executing the training initiatives, and allow time to plan for future strategies that will enhance your casino’s profitability.

The learning platform is a web portal that contains all of your training information, and is easily accessible by employees from one central location, creating a valuable resource for learning. Casino clients who have moved away from pamphlets and physical materials to digital training resources not only save countless dollars on paper, but also allow employees to have access to the information when they need it; regardless of the time of day.

At Casino Essentials, we partner with our clients to identify their training needs with automated policies, memos, and employee handbooks, so that it can be assigned and tracked by employee position via an automated dashboard – it’s that simple!

In this digital age of data-driven decision making, we value data as the primary driving force to periodically ensure that employees are fully equipped with the skills and knowledge to become successful in their day-to-day roles and responsibilities at your Casino. On our platform, we provide predefined and readily available reports which are less than a click away to track department or property wide training’s. Imagine eliminating the enormous time spent in manually tracking of employee’s training progress or in maintaining complex excel sheets?

Investing in your Casino’s company culture through e-Learning may be one of the best investments you can make for your organization. Automation will allow you to maximize your efforts in developing strategies for the growth of your casino and its employees, thereby resulting in an increase in the overall Return of Investment. How can you tailor learning to a new generation of employees and retain them?

Step 1: Just do it! Review your training initiatives and choose a few courses.
Step 2: Keep it simple and make it easy to access!
Step 3: Offer incentives and recognize those who embrace the technology.
Step 4: Now that you are up and running, document key performance indicators or company goals and determine how to achieve those goals with training initiatives, then measure them!

Need help? Call us. Our team is full of experts on training and performance.

M. Letourneau is an AML Subject Matter Expert.