No matter what industry you’re in, it’s important to consider the diverse needs of your employees, particularly when it comes to training multilingual learners. English is considered the dominant language of our global economy but providing effective and efficient learning opportunities in translation benefits both you and your employees. (It will also fulfill the U.S. Occupation Safety & Health (OSHA)’s regulatory requirements to provide instruction to your employees in a language and vocabulary they understand as well.)
Most people want to learn in their native language. This also helps to prevent minor miscommunications from escalating into major problems. For instance, OSHA estimates that about 25% of job-related accidents are at least partially linked to language barriers. By improving on-the-job safety and fostering a culture of inclusivity, you are also simultaneously supplying your multilingual learners with the tools they need to perform their jobs more effectively. In fact, according to a report from Forbes and Rosetta Stone, 80% of employees are able to be more productive when they receive instruction in their first language. With translated courses, you can more fully live out your mission, reaching a broader audience and helping to save more lives by ensuring that front-line workers are receiving the critical training content they require.
How Learning Technologies Can Help Protect Your People
There are many ways you can approach meeting the needs of your multilingual learners, but this can be difficult without the right tools. Fortunately, there are many learning technologies that can help you to provide training in translation for your employees so you can more effectively and efficiently meet their needs.
Multilingual learning should be offered to meet regulations, to better engage non-English speakers, and to help reduce injuries and even deaths due to a lack of understanding of the language in the training. Here are some tips for leveraging learning technologies to support a multilingual workforce.
1. Get Comfortable With AI-Powered Tools
Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools right now — and for good reason. Important yet difficult tasks can now be done much more efficiently and affordably. While human-translated courses from scratch may be prohibitively expensive, translation technologies are better than they have ever been.
For example, Amazon Web Services offers a robust catalog of tools that can help you meet the diverse needs of your multilingual learners, including using their technologies to create English captions for courses, to generate audio narration of those captions, and to develop translations of those captions in a wide range of languages, which can then be reviewed and revised as needed by humans. And this is truly just the tip of the iceberg of how AI-powered tools can improve how you’re delivering training.
Many AI-powered tools are not only incredibly efficient, but they also get better the more you use them — and the more that you train them to understand exactly what you need. To get the most out of your learning technologies, particularly if human-translated training is out of your budget, you may wish to rely on AI translation memory that can be trained to continually improve the quality of the translations it creates.
2. Embrace Everyday Apps
It’s your responsibility to provide your multilingual learners with training in the language they best understand, but there are many other ways you can help support their training. This includes utilizing various paid or free applications and websites that can help reinforce or facilitate the training you offer for your multilingual learners.
For instance, providing access to note-taking apps can help ensure that your learners are able to easily retain or review things they learn either on the job or through their training. You may also research literacy support apps that can provide translation or text-to-speech options for your learners. These and other digital tools can help ensure that your employees are all on the same page, regardless of their primary language.
3. Make Your Workflows Work for You
Providing your multilingual learners with the most effective training doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice efficiency. Rather, by investing in workflow automation software, you can account for — and meet — the specific needs of your diverse employee make-up with greater efficiency. For example, learning management software that can be tailored to your industry and your learners can help simplify your processes, requiring far less human intervention.
Workflow automations may include prompts that are sent to learners as soon as they reach certain milestones or complete specific courses, keeping them informed of their progress. Or workflow automations may alert managers to training gaps and recommended interventions or to learners with exemplary training results. By creating effective workflow automations for your regular processes, you can enhance the overall experience for multilingual learners and focus more on what matters most: keeping employees safe.
Give Your Multilingual Learners What They Need
When the safety of your employees is at stake, there is no room to compromise. Of course, that doesn’t mean that your training program will require a complete overhaul or that you’re going to have to break the bank to make necessary improvements. More than likely, small and intentional adjustments in how you use technology can greatly impact how effectively you’re meeting the needs of all of your employees, no matter their background or native language.
By honing in on the learning technologies that fit your industry needs, you will be able to level-up your training program for multilingual learners. In the process, you may also promote inclusivity, avoid expensive fines, improve communication between all of your employees and departments, increase productivity, and, most important of all, ensure that everyone goes home safely to their families each night.
