Driving era of hybrid work by learner centric training

Learner-centric learning

Among the many things the pandemic taught us, one important takeaway has been that hybrid work has offered seminal benefits to businesses and workforces globally. Employees can be based anywhere –home, office or café and their work schedules may vary, but their learning never needs to stop.

Organizations have realized that they need to invest time and resources in offering means to this hybrid workforce so that it can continue to learn, upskill and reskill for the future. Delivering learner-centric, personalized training is one of the best ways to meet employees where they are and ensure pertinent training is deployed to offer results in true learning.

Personalizing learning keeps learners at the centre of the learning experience and delivers training so that they can put it to use where necessary. Besides, in a time when everything around us is highlighted by user-centric personalization including social media, music recommendations, online shopping, food orders, advertising and streaming services, learning too isn’t an exception.

In this eBook, you will find insights on how to deliver learner-centric learning to your hybrid workforce in 2022 and beyond.

What & why learner-centric training

The last two years have made the entire world reimagine how and where work can happen, giving rise to the idea of a hybrid working model — a mix of remote and onsite. It’s a model that has appealed to a majority of the workforce globally given that it brings together the best of both worlds.

This has meant that learning too has to be hybrid to drive the hybrid working model. Incidentally, a one-size fits all learning has been passé for long but has most certainly become redundant since the last two years. If you want to create learning that engages all kinds of workers in your staff, your best bet is personalizing the learning so that not everybody has to learn the same lesson irrespective of whether they need it or not. Engaging learning is now all about customizing learning for each person as per his / her individual goals.

The Brandon Hall Group’s Upskilling and Reskilling Study points out that 93 percent of companies say personalized learning is very necessary and critical to drive both individual and organizational performance. For this, organizations need to get a proper overview of who their learners are, how they prefer to learn and what kind of needs and requirements they have as per their roles.

Demand for hybrid work

Importance of personalized learning

Also read: The Brandon Hall Group’s Upskilling and Reskilling Study

Why understanding your learners is the first step to personalized learning

It’s not enough to decide on creating a personalized learning experience. For this, you first need to have an expert understanding of your learners and their environment. Identifying the characteristics of learners in terms of their learning needs is imperative to create learning that is more targeted, impactful and focused. Only this can ensure that they are able to grasp the content well and get a good understanding of it.

If you do not create learning as per the need of your learners, it is likely that they will depend on content from sources other than the ones you as L&D offer them. They may consider that content to be easier and find it more useful. After all, if the information that learners need is not readily available to them, they will look to the internet to find it and then may end up finding incorrect, archaic or inappropriate content.

Aligning learning to employees' wants, needs and career paths

Given the rapidly evolving corporate landscape, constant uncertainties and digital progress, roles and responsibilities of the workforce are changing faster than we can comprehend. This means a culture of continuous learning is a must to ensure your employees stay on top of their game armed with the latest skills in their industry to remain competitive.

According to LinkedIn's 2022 Workplace Learning Report findings, the need for personalized learning is gaining more pull than ever, with 78 perent of respondents saying they want course recommendations based on career goals and skill gaps. Employees are more interested in learning when they find the content relevant to their current role.

Employees' top three motivations to learn are all connectd to careers:

1. If it helps me stay up to date in my field.
2. If it is personalized specifically for my interests and career goals.
3. If it helps me get another job internally, be promoted, or get closer to reaching my career goals.

Challenges in creating learning specific to learners

Developing personalized learning that focuses on the needs of learners requires a lot of hard work. Surely, there are several benefits of personalized learning including but not limited to increased learner engagement, better usage of time, increased motivation, and better learning outcomes.

However, it’s easier said than done for organizations to actually create learner centric learning. Even after companies make an attempt to know their learners well enough, it can still be a challenge to deliver personalized learning experiences to them. There can be several issues ranging from the managers’ role in learning, lack of proper technology to deliver a truly personalized learning experience and absence of the right skill set within the L&D team.

Challenges to personalization:

• 66 percent - We believe a one-size fits all training approach works for us
• 68 percent - We believe a one-size fits all training approach works for us
• 74 percent - We believe it is too expensive.
• 77 percent - We don't have the right tech to deliver personalized learning.
• 77 percent - Our L&D is not trained enough to develop & deliver personalized learning.
• 85 percent - We have managers who don't know what their employees are learning.

Strategies to successfully create learner centric learning

1. Implement blended learning

Blended learning is a mixed bag of a variety of training modalities. It is an integrated package consisting of guided learning, classroom training, eLearning, microlearning and mobile learning. Implementing a blended learning approach allows your learners the flexibility to choose the type of learning that they are most comfortable with.

     2. Craft personalized learning path

A personalized learning path gives you an opportunity to assign relevant training to targeted functions in the organizations. Based on the role your learner’s essay or the department they belong to, you can craft the necessary learning content. It can ensure your learner views only those training nuggets which are relevant to them.

     3. Leverage the power of social learning

Work can get stressful at times and giving employees the opportunity to interact with each other in an informal setting can certainly help reduce a part of it. While personalizing training, you can foster collaborative learning by providing platforms to learners where they can identify what others are learning. Discussion boards, communities, friending concept along with social media platforms are some of the effective avenues for social learning.

     4. Allow self-paced learning

Personalizing the learning experience can give your learners the flexibility to choose the time and method of learning. A Learning Management System (LMS) is a great platform that hosts courses, automates learning and most importantly personalizes learning to a great degree through technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. With mobile app functionality, learners can access learning anytime and anywhere or even download resources on-to-go.

Also read: L&D Challenges

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Key takeways of learner-centric training

When gearing up to create a learning and development strategy, taking a learner-centric approach has a massive impact on how much of the training information your employees will retain. It’s time organizations start increasingly choosing to skip the top-down development approach and empower employees to learn the way that works the best for them.

Moreover, with the proliferation of LMS technologies, there is more scope to explore new ways to deliver learning to today’s hybrid workforce in small doses through the day, allowing employees to learn as and when they see fit, personalizing the whole learning experience.

Also read: Employee engagement and experience for post covid world