How to Enhance Organizational Learning

“The capacity to learn is a gift, the ability to learn is a skill, the willingness to learn is a choice” – Brian Herbert

Learning and development (L&D) is intricately tied to employee engagement and employee retention. Today the times are changing fast, and employees are expected to keep pace to be able to deliver in the dynamic environment. Support by way of upskilling is considered a crucial success factor, and employees are turning to digital learning avenues to seek that support. But mere learning is not enough, employees expect to learn the way they want, as per their convenient channels, and as per their learning styles. As a result, L&D professionals are facing huge challenges to engage learners (Workplace Learning Report).

Here is how L&D professionals can enhance the organizational learning experience for their employees:

1. Personalized content: A one-fits-all mentality no longer works when it comes to learning. Every learner has a particular learning style and specific learning needs. For example, the networking skills that an HR professional needs would be very different from those that an IT professional needs. Accordingly, the content will vary greatly. The content must be curated according to the role, geography, performance expectations, deployment channels, learning styles, etc., i.e. it must be highly personalized. Only when being presented a personalized learning experience, will learners feel a “pull” towards learning.
2. Continuous commitment to content: Organizations often start their learning journeys with gusto, loading new content on the learning management system and communicating with each other. A few months down the line, the same content does the rounds of training interventions. It is natural that employees will lose interest seeing the same content every few months. Content must be constantly updated to meet the changing learning needs, as well as to engage learners.   
3. Bite sized learning: Employees today hardly have the time to complete long training modules. Nor are attention spans so long these days. There is thus, a raging need for bite-sized learning, by designing short, quick, and interactive learning modules. Short but meaningful content packaged as snippets of learning are a great engagement tool too—a short break from routine work.
4. Social learning: Learning is no longer limited to an employee signing into a module, completing it, and signing off. A lot is to be learned through social interactions and the wealth of knowledge and experience that people carry with them. Thankfully, today a plethora of social learning platforms are available to make knowledge accessible and shareable on a wide scale. What’s more, social learning is interactive and fun and serve as a great engagement medium as well. L&D professionals must look out for the best social learning platforms and try to adopt them.
5. Track program effectiveness: L&D professionals must know whether the training is serving to meet the learning objectives. L&D must be able to translate learning outcomes to business metrics. For this, the L&D team must involve business and finance stakeholders to measure and portray learning effectiveness.

Creating an effective L&D program is a learning journey that L&D professionals must embark on if they wish to meet the learning objectives. Moreover, these learning objectives too may change over time, as per the changing business landscape. L&D professionals must thus stay in tune with business changes and the market trends in the L&D space.