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Welcome to Higher Learning LV's Cannabis Industry Issues series. This article discusses ways in which the maturation and evolution of the legal cannabis industry is driving the need for professional on-demand training that achieves precise goals for enterprise organizations.
Cannabis and hemp companies cannot afford to waste training money. However, they also cannot suffer ill-prepared staff members who lack basic knowledge, creating inefficiencies and potentially frustrating customers or clients.
On-demand Cannabis Training is Economical
Smart cannabis enterprise organizations demand that staff training be both economical and effective. The only true way to gauge effectiveness is to assess the post-training proficiency of students. Some of our clients employ such skills assessment in a pre-training timeframe to determine the exact courses and support content that best serve a particular staff member.
Sometimes, companies employ skills assessment to make important hiring decisions, especially for technical positions requiring particular skill sets. Hit by a hyper-rapid wave of growth and expansion, cannabis companies have been forced to hire quickly—sometimes to the detriment of the quality of their new hires.
Skills assessment allows enterprise organizations to both prevent hiring the wrong staff and also to remediate skill deficiencies among current employees (which are inevitable). The business and biochemistry of cannabis is both nuanced and extremely complex. Research indicates that most industry professionals are deficient in their knowledge of the cannabis plant, its chemical constituents, and the complex regulatory oversight that governs it.
Why On-demand Cannabis Training is Best
Scenarios exist in which the resource-intensive old school model of bringing students to a physical classroom with an instructor best serves a company's training needs. In 2023, this model is mostly limited to courses involving hands-on workshops, such as training for cannabis cultivation, harvesting, or processing.
In most use case scenarios, on-demand training is best. Why? Because it is 1) most convenient for students and 2) significantly less resource intensive (which equates to less costly). However, effective on-demand training must truly be on-demand. The only way to achieve this is to support all technical platforms employed by students, including mobile (smartphones and tablets), desktop computers, and even smart TVs. All Higher Learning LV learning assets, including our courses, do so.
"The only way to achieve effective on-demand training is to support all technical platforms employed by students, including mobile (smartphones and tablets), desktop computers, and even smart TVs."
Instructor-led training offers heavy pros and cons. The problem with real-time instructor-led classes—be they physically proximate (in the same room) or conducted via a video conferencing service like Zoom or Microsoft Teams—is that the instructor must set a pace. This pace is typically too fast for about one-third of the class and too slow for another third. The speed of instructor-led classes is "just right" for only one out of three students.
Self-paced (on-demand) training allows students to learn at their own speed. Humans read, process, and memorize information in very different ways. Basic psychology tells us that on-demand training is not only more convenient to schedule and perform, but that a student's ability to engage in training when they want and to set their own pace provides significantly better learning. This includes increased data retention and improved interest levels.
Cannabis Training Delivers Competitive Advantage
Done correctly, training and education is an affordable service for any size company, large or small. From single-location "mom and pop" dispensaries to multistate operators with billion-dollar footprints, all companies need knowledgeable, skilled staff to execute their business plan and daily operations. This includes not only core industry segments such as cultivation, manufacturing, and retail, but also ancillaries like legal, real estate, financing, and insurance.
Effective training in the cannabis industry goes beyond budtender programs and includes most or all employees. Companies strapped for cash obviously cannot deliver copious amounts of premium customized training to every staff member (particularly large enterprises with several thousand employees).
"The modular design of our training means that we can rearrange lessons to meet the particular needs of specific job descriptions."
This is why Higher Learning LV offers courseware customization to our enterprise clients. The intelligently flexible modular design of our training means that we can customize courses and lessons to meet the needs of specific job descriptions, departments, or divisions (especially if our clients must train some or all of their employees to achieve regulatory compliance).
We could blather on about the ways in which premium training can helps our clients improve their competitiveness and profitability until the cows come home. Rather, our model of offering some of our unstructured training assets at no cost allows prospective students and enterprise clients to conveniently and thoroughly sample the quality of our premium content.
Higher Learning LV—Your New Cannabis Training Vendor
Higher Learning LV has been described as disruptive. Perhaps. We simply know that we are your future training vendor. To survive, cannabis and hemp companies must do more with less, effectively training staff members while not blowing their budget during financially tight times.
Higher Learning LV's new Enterprise Pricing provides significant savings to our clients who enroll as few as 10 employees in our courses. Our top enterprise tier offers clients a 67 percent reduction from our standard enrollment fees.
Thank you for visiting Higher Learning LV. We're looking forward to being your new training and education vendor.
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