High Ideas To Enhance Efficiency
Increase the performance of your employees and promote professional growth with targeted training content
When a company doesn’t have the technology or platforms to create and sustain a learning culture, everything is more difficult: attempts to deliver successful new hiring training, compliance training, and professional development suffer as a result. When employees cannot access the resources they need to do their jobs, or when they spend time on training that is irrelevant, it negatively affects their view of the company. It also consumes a lot of time and resources.
For this reason, it is time to consider how your training offering enables or disrupts learning – both in the office and in a remote work environment. The training and development system, which includes all the possibilities with which the system enables or hinders learning, can be viewed as a learning ecosystem in your company.
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The Future of Work: The Role of Instructional Design in Moving from VILT to eLearning in 2021
Learn how to convert classroom training and start an eLearning strategy based on solid ID methodology.
How to develop a holistic learning ecosystem
By applying learning performance advisor best practices, you can develop a comprehensive learning ecosystem that delivers employee performance support, job aids, workflow tools, and resources at the right time, to the right employee, and in the right training method. We see this system as a central hub that connects every part of the ecosystem. Such a system can create the foundation and framework of your learning culture, enable a cohesive and relevant learning experience, and maintain your brand.
What training technology do you need to develop and support an office or remote learning ecosystem? The first key to a learning ecosystem is a central hub. This is an employee development platform that ties into every learning element that your employees will use. This is an integrated system that requires you to bring analytics, aggregated platforms, and data feeds together to effectively deliver training and resources.
Note that the learning portal, career development platform, and resource tools should all be interconnected to provide a comprehensive, just-in-time learning experience that is precisely designed to facilitate learning and support for your employees at work.
Once you have the learning portal in place, there are a number of training resources and modalities that become feasible. Microlearning – or the method of breaking information into smaller, more digestible “bites” – is a useful best practice for designing training and development content that is built into your workflow and supports remote learning.
Remote Working In The New Normal: The Accessibility Problem
Depending on the goals of your initiative, some assets may be more effective than others. In a remote work setting, it is important to note availability both online and offline.
When it comes to novel additions to a learning ecosystem, there are some that have become more popular in recent years. Offline content libraries and toolkits have proven useful in organizations with traveling technicians or salespeople. Now they could also be useful for a remote workforce. The ability to access content without being connected to the Internet or the corporate server is a technical challenge that is often overlooked, but is critical to overcoming access and availability issues.
The way content management platforms organize assets can also have a huge impact on content consumption. For example, consider indexing topics and terms and related terms within a learning path. Accessibility and an intuitive learning experience are critical when employees are working remotely on training and development activities, as they do not have the option to reach out to an employee, colleague, or manager for immediate assistance.
The ability to suggest additional resources based on individual content usage data and taking micro-learning into account will help expand the knowledge base of your learning audience. A central hub for learning also provides space for social learning elements. For example, a forum to share informal learning experiences such as lessons learned or informative videos on sales techniques would give the learning journey a sense of community. Creating a sense of community is a valuable tool for keeping your remote workers connected, identifying with your brand, being engaged and motivated.
An example: new hires and social support
Let’s consider how these assets might work for an employee on the job. A new employee, whom we will call Adrian, encounters an obstacle for a customer on a project but does not know how to proceed. Instead of emailing a manager and waiting for feedback, Adrian goes to the company’s learning catalog to find a solution. After a quick search, Adrian finds a resource that describes the internal processes for managing project timeline revisions. The learning portal then suggests reading a related asset that describes different project management models or navigating difficult conversations. The learning experience proves helpful, so Adrian shares the win as an anecdote on the forum of her department. This is a trust-building experience that builds a community through information sharing and ideally also serves as a refresher for other new hires facing similar challenges.
Social sharing is also key to creating a cohesive learning environment – especially when your workforce is remote. If employees can share their learning with others via integrated tools, they are more involved with the content and the system and contribute to a uniform learning culture. A best practice forum enables you to leverage this commitment and help your learners develop targeted behaviors to make your business a success. Such a forum could contain searchable case studies that introduce and deconstruct best and worst practices so that learners can replicate these practices and share them with their peers.
The Future of Work: How to Improve Performance with Training and Development Content
It’s important to note: A best practice forum needs to be managed and curated to ensure that the resources are of high quality, consistent with your brand, and relevant to your business. Another key to a hub, of course, is the ability to track and evaluate your employees’ progress toward their learning goals. Not only does AllenComm have incredible performance consulting resources to help you design exactly what you need, we also have a team of technical experts. They will work with you to create the technical aspects of the training and record the data to enhance your staff’s performance through a learning ecosystem that provides easily accessible training. The hub personalizes experiences through core competencies, diagnoses that tailor learning,
and strategic timing that enables learners to access complementary training at the right time.
These tools can be used for new hire training, compliance training, and other employee training and development activities. In the next chapter we will discuss how the mental health of employees can be positively influenced using the same learning strategies and digital tools.
Download the eBook The Future of Work: The Role of Instructional Design in Moving from VILT to eLearning In 2021, you will launch a personalized virtual training program that will involve every member of your team.
AllenComm
AllenComm’s experts solve business problems with beautiful custom learning solutions. We bring creativity to the teaching design. We change behavior and influence decisions. We’re building a better workout.
