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When moving from traditional, mandatory elearning, to a more self-service style of learning, there is a challenge created for L&D professionals: the potentially significant falloff in uptake – that’s democracy for you!
The fact of the matter is that you have to work harder with content to make it engaging, easy to access and relevant to the workspace, to manage and drive uptake.
Overall, self-service represents a more grown-up environment. For example, there is an increasing desire for colleagues to take responsibility for their learning and career pathways.
However, the same colleagues are under a lot of pressure to deliver – often reeling from a barrage of information. They receive hundreds of emails every day, view long slide decks, attend extended meetings, work within a changing environment and so on – and that’s when things are going well!
One of the biggest challenges that L&D professionals face is how to drive uptake, encourage users to come back, and create engaged learners.
Seems like common sense? Yet, this is somehow regularly overlooked in learning solutions.
Here are six tips to turn your employees into active learners by creating a learner-centric experience.
1. Personalisation
Personalising learning content is a simple and effective way to create a sense of ownership and increase emotional engagement. Digital content is increasingly becoming more personalised,
Spotify and Netflix both use complex algorithms to understand what their users like and don’t like, and then recommend content accordingly.
We must customise our learning tools in the same way. From simply addressing the user by name to using adaptive algorithms to recommend learning content that is relevant to them, there are plenty of ways to help learners feel more connected to their training.
It’s important to take the time to understand what motivates your learners, what appeals to them and what doesn’t.
2. Make it easy to access
Not everybody’s alike, and as a result, not everybody learns the same way. Recognising the diverse individuality of learners is something that has been understood by teachers for centuries – the good ones anyway!
By offering multi-device learning, organisations can increase the capacity for training to be tailored to the individual.
While some people may feel most comfortable learning at their desk on their PC, the millennials and members of Generation Z in your workforce have grown up in the digital age, they are true digital natives, and will (most likely) feel at home on their smartphone or tablet.
3. Think about motivation
So, you’ve got a library of great learning content, you’ve made it easy for users to access … now the hard part is getting your customers to consume the content.
Gamification, push notifications, socialisation and a rewards system can all be effective ways to motivate your users to return.
However, in the same way as all learners are different, they will also be motivated in different ways. It’s important to take the time to understand what motivates your learners, what appeals to them and what doesn’t.
It is only through proper understanding of your learner’s motivations that you can truly engage them with learning.
4. Make content available on-demand
It’s no secret that workers are under more pressure than ever, with less time but a larger workload. Therefore, it should be no surprise that employees want training that can be easily integrated into their daily work lives.
They want to access learning with a moment’s notice and with ease. Not only is this more time-effective, but it also allows employees to access training immediately before it’s required – whether this is running a staff meeting, giving tough feedback, or remembering the four key safety steps.
5. Keep it short
To make points two, three and four possible, the content needs to be kept short and sharp. It’s simply too difficult to engage a learner with a 30-minute video on a phone and it’s too time-consuming to watch a lot of content before a meeting.
Break the content into short and actionable segments – don’t try to deliver too much content in one go.
6. The final step
The final stage of this process is bringing all our tips together into a single learning package. Each of these tips cannot be entirely effective without the others, they work in unison to deliver a fully learner-centric experience.
Through considering these tips at every stage of creating your learner experience, you can be confident that you will drive uptake, engage your learners, and make sure they keep coming back.
About the author
Gerry Griffin [2] is the founder of Skill Pill [3]. Follow Skill Pill on Twitter here [4].
