Pharma Industry needs to look beyond conventional Classroom trainings!

Pharma Industry needs to look beyond conventional Classroom trainings!

Despite rapidly growing proclivity towards digitization and advanced technology applications, Pharma and Biotech industry continues to remain highly dependent on human competences. Review of the regulatory citations of recent past suggests, a major chunk of non-compliances are still due to knowledge or skill gaps - which can be directly or indirectly attributed to training effectiveness, even though they are not so explicitly mentioned in the observations. Obviously, the human performance variability and its impact on product quality has clearly grabbed the attention of the regulators worldwide. This is also evident from the newly published EU annex-1, that has such an elaborate section on ‘Personnel’ as compared to its last update in 2003.

This is apparently leading to increasing focus of the pharma organizations to make training as an important pillar of their quality systems. However, many top leaders of such organizations still wonder - why do so many people in the company fail to perform in the right way, even after going through the training programs each year? This is an obvious question, but the answer lies deep inside our current training systems in the Pharma industry. A lot of previous research on this subject, points towards the following reasons for trainings not being effective;

• Trainees do not receive the intended message fully because of barriers like language, attention or prior knowledge on the subject.

• They are not able to understand the criticality or usefulness of the subject they are trained on.

• They do not believe that the new methodology will work for them or it is any better than the current practice.

• They are also hesitant to try the new ways as they are afraid it might increase their workload or cause any inconvenience.

• Current facility and process design doesn’t support implementation of new learnings.

• New learnings are lost very fast due to unavailability of opportunity to practice on the ground. In such cases its unable to overcome the existing habits.

• There is no mechanism to accurately evaluate the trainees’ competency before deployment on a job.

​​The experiment by the German psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus, well known as “Ebbinghaus forgetting curve” demonstrates the information received is forgotten over time very fast when no systematic efforts made to retain it. Also studies suggest that class room training and self reading modes are list effective (less than 10%) amongst various other training modes.

​Virtual reality provides a perfect answer to the above challenges by simulating an actual shop-floor environment near to real and providing an auto guided immersive training platform where trainees can self learn and get qualified without intervention of a human trainer. VR as a training mode offers several advantages over the conventional trainings in Pharma. Some of these are - unlimited practice options, instant correction, better understanding of the subjects by visuals, better knowledge retention, better employee engagement, and better overall efficiency.

These facts energized us to create the modules pertaining to critical processes in pharma. This is an attempt to alleviate this most challenging compliance and productivity issue of current days. I am sure that our modules can help you in mitigating all your current people practice related concerns and can help in setting better compliance and productivity standards in your organization.

Please reach out to us anytime for discussing on this subject.