It’s been a crazy couple of weeks. The coronavirus pandemic is hitting everyone hard, and as I have talked to various life sciences training clients, I heard about a lot of postponements, cancellations, and scrambling.
So, this week, I decided to do a snap survey. I reached out to individuals in about 90 different pharma/biotech/med device companies (of all sizes) with 4 simple questions, and got almost a 30% response within one day (thank you)!
Here are the four questions:
- Is your company currently canceling or postponing live group events, such as sales meetings or training classes?
- Are you having to rapidly “virtualize” pre-planned training events?
- Are you being asked/required to put off internal face-to-face meetings and/or vendor meetings?
- Is your company asking/requiring a large number of employees to work from home?
The results were startling:
Has your work been thrown into a tizzy? Well, you’re definitely not alone!
The vast majority of companies are making rapid, major changes to how/whether they are conducting meetings (and, I will add, not JUST training meetings). This week, in fact, as a vendor/consultant, I have cancelled three upcoming trips for April because clients are now postponing or cancelling most non-mission-critical meetings.
Just about every trainer I’ve spoken to in recent days is having to try to transition planned upcoming group meetings into some kind of virtual format (with the aid of their vendor/partners, who are also scrambling with them). This is complicated by the increase – growing by the day – in companies encouraging or requiring work from home (social distancing strategy) in order to minimize potential spread of the virus.
I will continue to monitor what steps people in our corner of the industry are taking to manage this threat, with a particular eye to virtual meeting tools. If you are using, or seeking to adopt, a particular kind of virtual/on-line/video/meeting platform, please reach out to me so I can gather resources and make recommendations.
In the meantime, here are a couple helpful links to resources you may want to scan:
- From ATD: Curated list of Virtual Training Resources
- From eLearningCoach: Resources for Creating Live Virtual Training
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