Training – streamed live from the KRONE Training Centre
More than 100 participants from 16 nations trained simultaneously

Spelle, April 2021: It has now been a full year since the coronavirus pandemic took hold. Among the consequences was a disruption to the obligatory product training courses at the KRONE Training Centre in Spelle. Jan Holk, Head of the KRONE Training Centre: “It started with the foreign participants cancelling, but then travel within Germany was also restricted to such an extent that we were either unable to arrange corona-compliant classroom training at all or had to restrict groups to only a few participants.”

The KRONE training team responded to the changed circumstances by developing an online training concept that allows international service and sales partners to receive professional training in the comfort of their own homes. “Right from the first lockdown, we started to put the training and practical modules on video; these were then embedded in an e-learning framework. Participants were then invited to book in for the new video training format via our online training portal.  Fortunately, online training was not completely new territory for us, as we had already introduced the first web-based training modules in 2018.”
The big advantage of digital video training is that participation is not constrained by time or location: participants can structure the session to suit their personal needs, pausing or interrupting and continuing or repeating it the next day.

KRONE Managing Director Wolfgang Jung, head of Service & Parts, considers the first year of online training to have been a great success:  "Thanks to the sheer professionalism of multiple departments working in collaboration, we were able to purchase and install the necessary equipment for our new streaming services very quickly. Meanwhile, we converted a hall in the training centre into a permanent film studio, which was jokingly referred to by staff as ‘Spellewood’. This allowed us to adopt another format called Distance Training to deliver entirely digital presentations of the new KRONE machines for 2021 for the first time. The positive feedback we have received from our partners in Germany and further afield has encouraged us to aim for an even higher professional standard. The technology we use even makes it possible to follow the live stream with a time delay, which means that participants can join in later depending on their local time zone and simply rewind to the beginning of the stream. This feature has enabled us to include participants from New Zealand and from the west coast of the USA at the same time in one and the same session, even though the time difference was almost a whole day. That’s why our trainers start each session with a friendly ‘Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, ladies and gentlemen’.”

KRONE now offers 82 video and distance training courses in German and English, which can be booked by KRONE sales partners at times convenient to them. Regular knowledge quizzes are integrated into the training courses. “In this way, we ensure that all participants are keeping up with each other. At the end of the course, there is a final test. If the participants have performed well in the quizzes and passed the final test, we issue them with their personal certificate, in exactly the same way as if they had attended a classroom-based course.” Jan Holk judges the shift to online learning to have been an overall success: “Of course, it is still a special challenge to be addressing a camera without being able to see the individual faces of the training participants, but in these pandemic times this is certainly the best solution for all involved. In addition, our experience over the past year has convinced us that it makes absolute sense for us to integrate more online formats into our training strategy in the future.”