Many of us are starting the year doing a lot of evaluation. Evaluating ourselves, evaluating our fitness and health, and at work, evaluating our contributions. And some of us have decided to make changes.
In learning and development, many want to improve the way we support employees. We’re asking questions like:
– How can I convince my employees to make time for learning?
– How can we make learning part of the day instead of a tedious activity?
– What can we do to make content more interesting?
I’ve been asking these questions too, and in my search for answers, I found the best place to start was better understanding my employees (learners).
Here are my top 3 recommendations for facilitating a good learning experience.
- Support employees so learning can happen available anytime, anywhere.
Workers don’t confine their development to the “office” or typical work hours. In Degreed’s “How the Workforce Learns” report, 85% of people said they learn at work, 67% do so on personal time and 18% are learning during travel or commutes.
While this feels like you might have less control than you’d like, it’s actually a good thing for retention.
Benedict Carey, author of How We Learn and writer at The New York Times, actually recommends changing locations while learning. New scenery maximizes the number of associations tied to a certain memory and makes it easier to access when trying to reconnect with the content later on.
So, creating the environment and culture where employees feel that ALL the learning they do, wherever they do means increased valued and they’ll likely retain information and make connections more effectively.
- Stop worrying about millennials and boomers and start worrying about learner preferences.
I led a panel discussion last year on the generational differences in the workforce with eBay and BlueBeyond consulting. We had a representative from the 4 generations in the workforce today, and what surfaced was that societal trends, more than age, influence preferences for digesting information.
70% of the time, learning still happens on PCs. But smartphones (17%) and tablets (13%) account for 30% of digital development.
While there is some broad truth to generational differences, there were plenty of boomers in the room who prefer YouTube “how-to’s” and a significant number of millennials who still to write things down and would choose face to face over IM.
The takeaway? Learning preference is just that, an individual’s preference. Regardless of generation, we should give each employee options that appeal to their unique learning style and preferences in content themes
- When investing in new tech, consider more than efficiency.
Many L&D teams are trying to do more with less. Content that appeals to a broader audience, templates that standardize and one system that can do it all.
But how does this approach cater to the reality that we build skills over time, and from a variety of sources including books, conversations, and experience?
As Degreed’s new Innovators Guide points out, the problem with this approach is that in a typical L&D environment, the content (as well as the systems, people, and work experiences) are isolated. They rarely work together to interact or share data. “As a result, they don’t give anyone a useful picture of our learning activities or, more importantly, our skill-sets,” said Todd Tauber, VP of Product Marketing at Degreed.
Instead, we need to consider the benefits of being in the age of technology, and thanks to things like APIs, organizations can form world-class systems from multiple, best of breed solutions. “This is the near future of learning technology: intelligent networks of tools, content, systems, people, and data all working together to empower your workforce to learn better, faster AND more cost-effectively,” added Tauber.
Ready to learn more? Check out Degreed’s Innovator’s Guide.